


“Xekyprius ‘Kyp’ Amortrian Durron: Much More Than Just Another Pretty Face”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [52]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alliances, Alternate Timelines, Attempted Brainwashing, Battle, Bisexuality, Byss, Chiss, Confusion, Dark Adepts, Death Star, Death Star II, Death Star prototypes, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Expanded Universe Character Death(s), Expanded Universe Character(s), F/M, Falling In Love, Families of Choice, Family, Family Drama, Family Secrets, Fear, Friendship/Love, Galaxy Gun, Healing, Hero Worship, Hurt, Jealousy, Kidnapping, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Love, M/M, Manipulations, Maw Installation, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mental Anguish, Mental Coercion, Mental/Emotional/Spiritual Violation, Nightmares, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Our Ladies of Pain, Pain, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Sith machinations, Stowaway Fighter, Sun Crusher, Temptation, Torture, Training, True Love, Unrequited Love, Visions, Weddings, World Devastators, dark side
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-05
Updated: 2009-05-05
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:18:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is one hundred and eleven random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Xekyprius “Kyp” Durron (as preliminarily planned out for the AU series <i><b>You Became to Me</b></i>, anyway), a Jedi Bendu renown for his piloting skills and sheer raw ability in the Force. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Xekyprius ‘Kyp’ Amortrian Durron: Much More Than Just Another Pretty Face”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Xekyprius “Kyp” Durron’s life, as he is likely going to be eventually written in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series **_You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is (meant to be) compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, though I am essentially projecting a character’s backstory for a point still far in the future of the timeline for said AU series, so . . . please take that statement with a grain of salt, as things could always eventually end up changing! **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed/adapted from somewhere on the LJ (I don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to the challenge associated with that set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Kyp. **3.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Kyp and Zeth (Zetharius Kyrenic) Durron, essentially original characters (considering that Kyp’s parents are barely even mentioned in the EU at all, much less described in any kind of detail) like Ellanzia “Zee” Ristaria Malthanya Durron and Kelcenric “Cen” Xecynris Durron, and original characters like the twins, Mycelthair “Cel” Zykenric and Calsamus “Cal” Eltharius Durron, Kelcenric’s youngest brother, Khaarmas Gildon Durron, and Gaeri and Luke’s girls should **_please_** consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are all available on my LJ! For clarity's sake, though, please keep in mind that _this_ version of Kyp really should be pictured as a young Christian Bale with very dark, loosely curly hair, and dark, olivine-hued eyes that most folks would agree are a shade of green. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain minor family members of original characters or mere acquaintances of EU characters, for example) are either considered too minor to be cast at this time or too far into the future of the AU series to cast with any finality just yet, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish, at least for the moment (though it might be a good idea for readers to keep in mind the fact that it’s probably safer to refrain for now from trying to picture, with any kind of real detail, any characters who seem important enough to feature in any other story I might end up writing that’s set in/around this era of my AU timeline, since the likelihood is that if a character’s important enough to show up in more than one of my stories, then that probably means that the character will, at some point, eventually be cast)! Also, readers might want to note that, in the case of Gaeri and Luke’s children, adults (or teens) have been used as the physical models largely due to the fact that I’m more familiar with adult (rather than child) actors/actresses, models, and etc. and I genuinely thought that these specific individuals looked as though they could be the offspring of the individuals in question. As for Ben (Captison) Kenobi-Skywalker being cast as the same person I envision as Ben (as a teenager/near adult) in the actual EU (when he’s Ben [Jade] Skywalker), well . . . Ben is going to be a somewhat special case, and that’s all I have to say about him, at the moment. **4.)** My Anakin Solo is born just a little bit later in this timeline (a few months. A little less than half a year, really) than he’s accounted as having been born in the EU, but then, my Anakin is also born as one in a set of fraternal twin boys, so . . . **_please_** just keep in mind that this is an AU and that I have specific reasons for the things that I do, when I alter things of this magnitude! Also, Anakin Solo is still Anakin Solo because, well . . . he is, after all, an **_extremely_** special boy. There’s a little bit more to it than that, but I believe that this is going to be something of an eventual plot point, so . . . for now, please, just see the note on Ben, above! **5.)** Tentatively, Luke and Gaeri’s children are, in order: Shmei’la (Cybellé) and Mircaillé (Soljana); Saori (Arinoor) and Linnaeam (Jylitta); Escharhea (Pachmé) and Ashodeé (Friya); Kyandis (Cedylia) and Darshurvai (Anandité); and Lioben (or Ben) (Jenan) Kenobi-Skywalker. Please note that names shown here in parenthesis are, with the exception of Lioben’s nickname (Ben), the traditional Nabooian shadow names, or childhood names, of the various children!

**"Xekyprius ‘Kyp’ Amortrian Durron: Much More Than Just Another Pretty Face"**

　

 **01.) Soft:** The Mid Rim planet of Naboo is a relatively soft world – a lush, beautiful, enormously water-rich, temperate jewel of a planet, the sentient population of which is largely peaceful (or at least mostly reasonable, though the humans and Gungans have been known to quarrel in the past and, should anyone be foolish enough to attempt to invade, both species would without a doubt fight fiercely to defend their homes) – especially compared to a rough, harsh colony world like Deyer, tucked away as it is in such a far remove of the still largely lawless Outer Rim Territories, and so one might be tempted to assume that a childhood in such a gentle, forgiving environment would be similarly placid and easy; however, given the strength that lies beneath the quiet exterior of the people of Naboo and the recent prominence both of Naboo itself as well as certain specific Nabooians in the larger galactic theatre, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Xekyprius "Kyp" Durron would (if asked) more likely describe his childhood on Naboo as having never been dull, rather than in terms of mildness or calmness.

 **02.) Strong:** Kyp has always known that he’s strong in the Force, stronger even than anyone else in his family: his parents are both strong in the Force, his father, Kelcenric "Cen" Durron, being a former initiate of the Jedi Order sent to the Agri-Corps far less out of any real weakness in his connection to the Force than due to a dearth of sufficient available Knights and Masters for all of the potential Padawans and the fact that his specific talents fitted him more for a life working closely with agriculture and animal husbandry than for fighting, and his mother, Ellanzia "Zee" Malthanya Durron, having been kept and raised by her parents in spite of a request a give her to the Jedi Temple for training because she was the first child her mother managed to carry to full term and her parents feared she might end up being their only child; the twins, Mycelthair and Calsamus (or Cel and Cal, as they usually insist on being called), having inherited various of their father’s abilities – including an almost magical way with plants and an incredible natural empathy with animals, a strong talent for sensing and for being able to alleviate sickness both in other beings and in the surrounding world, and a solid overall connection to the Living Force – along with some of their mother’s Force-enhanced charisma and overall ability to understand and to empathize with other sentient beings; and Zeth (Zetharius, actually, but he’s never answered to his full name) having inherited most of their mother’s talent with far-sight, psychometry, and her drawing power, that Force-enhanced ability to understand and to sway the hearts and minds of other beings as easily and naturally as breathing, with those talents being further enhanced by their father’s strong empathy; in Kyp, though, his parents’ talents and strength in the Force not only combined but in effect built upon and magnified each other, so that he is like a blazing star in the Force compared to their towering bonfires (and the similarly brilliant watchfires of his brothers), his range of abilities and raw power such that the need to teach Kyp proper control has never really been in question, given how laughably easy it would be for someone so strong in the Force to accidentally cause harm to others and/or his surroundings, given a lack of control.

 **03.) Wonder:** Kyp wonders sometimes what his life might have been like, if Callista Masana had not come to Deyer just when she did – if she hadn’t found his parents first, among the few strong Force-sensitives on that colony world; if she hadn’t saved Momma from miscarrying the twins; if she hadn’t convinced Momma and Papa to relocate to Naboo, so that they could receive further training at the New Jedi Bendu Order’s chapterhouse in Dala City; if his parents hadn’t so fallen in love with Naboo that they decided to make it their permanent home and raise their family there – but he usually doesn’t allow himself to think about it for very long, since it tends to give him bad dreams about being himself but not looking like himself (he knows that it’s him, Kyp Durron, in the dreams, but whenever he sees himself in them, he looks nothing like what he really does, even taking into account the fact that the him in his dreams is usually a lot older than he is right now. This Kyp Durron has green eyes like grass or emeralds, so bright and vivid that they almost look fake, pitch black, wavy-curly hair, and naturally bronzed, darker-toned skin, more like Cel or especially Cal, as well as a fuller mouth and a slightly longer face with features that are all just different enough to be disconcerting), about being forced to work in a horribly cold, dark place, a nasty Dark man whispering unctuously in his ear about how strong Kyp is in the Force and how he and he alone can teach Kyp how to use that strength properly so that he will never be helpless or powerless again, a pretty young woman with blue skin and feathers instead of hair who always seems to be looking at Kyp with a combination of horror and terror, huge explosions so bright that they look like stars dying, and the painful snapping of bones ( _his_ bones, giving way with noises something like breaking branches, only with an ugly, weirdly meaty sort of overtone to the sounds, almost like flesh being slapped wetly against flesh), and he always wakes from these nightmares shaking, gasping, and crying, feeling an inexplicable urge to apologize (to someone. To _anyone_!) and a terrible need to take a long, scalding-hot shower, as if he’s somehow done something wrong and in some way dirtied himself.

 **04.) Know:** Kyp knows that he is exceptionally strong in the Force; he knows that his family loves him and that he loves them in turn; he knows that he is an extremely handsome, highly talented, exceedingly intelligent person who excels at virtually everything he puts his mind to and who attracts others’ attention effortlessly; he knows that he finds misdirection and lying – even for the sake of avoiding hurting someone’s feelings – distasteful, that he cannot see the point in essentially empty flattery, and that diplomacy is not and probably never will be his forte, considering how blunt he naturally tends to be; and he knows that some people think him arrogant, because he refuses to pretend to false humbleness, to bolster the egos of others if they are undeserving of praise, or to resort to flowery language and empty phrases to avoid calling attention to the shortcomings of others: no matter what sort of cruel or unkind things other beings may say about him, he prefers to think of himself as practical, scrupulously honest, loving to and well-loved by the ones in his life who truly matter, and to be trying to prove himself worthy of all the many advantages he has received in life, by putting his talents to good use and striving to be the very best that he possibly can, so that he can do the most good with his gifts, rather than wasting time, effort, and energy on pursuits and personages ultimately unworthy of his attention.

 **05.) Memory:** One of his first truly distinct memories is of being in the Palace at Theed in the midst of a great jumble of noise and confusion – of having been in the handmaiden training salles with his brothers and a group of handmaidens and their friends when an unexpected attack was launched on the capitol, a wave of explosions rocking the city to distract attention away from an assault on the Palace itself and sending ripples and cresting waves of panic and fear and anger roiling powerfully through the Force – and of running with Quianna, a former Princess of Theed (who would, several years later, be crowned Kylantha, Queen of Naboo), only to have to push her back out of the way of an approaching bevy of searchers, instinctively reaching out into the Force to project such a strong sense of _emptiness_ and _nothingness_ out towards the enemy even while throwing _calmness_ and _healing_ back at the wounded woman behind him that, when he peeped out from behind the drapes concealing their makeshift hiding place, he was able to safely watch the boots of the attacking soldiers as they ran blindly past them, even while the jagged holes in Quianna’s shoulder and thigh glowed softly with power and rapidly began to knit themselves back together again behind him.

 **06.) Dream:** Kyp wishes sometimes (if more wistfully than seriously) that far-sight weren’t among the very few abilities of his parents that he somehow or another didn’t manage to inherit in spades: even though Momma always insists that it’s a bad idea to rely too much just on what one sees in visions and Zeth pretty much always tells him about the most interesting things that he sees in his dreams anyway (it’s a long-standing arrangement of theirs. Kyp tries very hard to be a good little brother, and Zeth rewards him by telling him all about his far-sight dreams and the visions his psychometry gives him, whenever he picks up on strong impressions that are entertaining or especially cryptic and mysterious), he thinks that it would be nice to occasionally have some true dreams of his own, even if he’s fairly sure he’s not missing out on too terribly much, between what Momma usually lets slip and Zeth has no compunction about passing along.

 **07.) Different:** He and his brothers resemble one another and their parents only in the broadest sense, physically speaking – being taller than average, dark-haired, and either green-eyed or else possessing amber or brown eyes liberally flecked with green, the distinctly different and strong features of their parents all mixed together amongst him and his brothers, combining in such various ways that even the twins are often mistaken for cousins or else simply good friends, rather than siblings – but they are more alike in their interests and beliefs than they are different, and they are so close, not only as a family but as friends, that no one who truly knows them would ever mistake them for anything other than related, despite their varying appearances.

 **08.) Alike:** Since he and his family do physically resemble each other only in the loosest of ways, Kyp is always a little bit surprised when he comes across families in which the children are all so alike that they look like younger copies of each other or so very like their parents that they look like slightly blurred, younger versions of either their fathers or their mothers, and, as he grows, he often finds himself wondering if the children of such families have a hard time establishing themselves as distinct individuals, given how easy it would be for those who are familiar with their families to see them first and foremost either as their parents or else as their older siblings, instead of as their own distinctly different, individual selves . . . and being glad that he and his family are more alike in temperament and abilities than they are in looks!

 **09.) First:** The first time Kyp actually meets the famous Kenobi and Skywalker Team is also, unfortunately, the first time he has an encounter with one of the so-called Experimentals: he’s five years old and so very excited at the prospect of the heroes visiting Naboo and of his family finally getting to formally meet them that he’s hurrying, darting ahead of Zeth down one of the many familiar back passageways of the Theed Palace, wanting to hurry up and find the twins (who, because of their friendliness with many of the younger siblings and other close relatives of various of the handmaidens, have earned all four boys a standing invitation to visit and even use the training facilities used by the handmaidens, anytime they happen to be in Theed) so that they can practice how they’re going to act and what they’re going to say, when they’re introduced to the greatest living legends of the whole of the known galaxy, and he has the misfortune to barrel around a corner right as a party is approaching it from the other end of the hallway . . . all but running headlong into a pale, slender young man with shockingly bright blue eyes, a teenager whose slim body snaps painfully rigid when his long-fingered hands try to latch on to and steady Kyp, to keep them both from overbalancing and ending up in a tangled heap on the floor, fingers digging with bruising-hardness into Kyp’s shoulders as he leans forward, blue eyes rolling up to nothing but white, voice coming out harsh and low and accusing as he declares, "I _know_ you – I _see_ you – killer of stars!"

 **10.) Last:** The absolute last thing Kyp would have ever wanted would’ve been to act like a scared baby and make a fool of himself in front of the Hero of the Infinite – he wants to be like the very best parts of the Negotiator and the Hero With No Fear combined when he grows up, for pity’s sake! – but there’s just something so unsettling (and so oddly familiar) about being named a "killer of stars" that he really can’t help but react badly, and it’s not until he finally notices that Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Experimental are all basically verbally tripping over each other and themselves, trying to apologize for giving him such a scare, that he finally starts to calm down, and it will be a long, _long_ while before he’ll be able to look back on the experience with any kind of equanimity, much less good humor!

 **11.) Good:** One truly good thing does come out of all the confusion and embarrassment surrounding Kyp’s first meeting with the Kenobi and Skywalker Team: Obi-Wan Kenobi (the Negotiator _himself_!) takes enough personal interest in him and his sheer raw strength in the Force to see to it that a new Jedi Bendu Master with enough power and experience to challenge students like Kyp is brought to Naboo to work as an instructor at the chapterhouse in Dala City, so that a new training group – with individuals whose power levels and abilities are all high enough, sufficiently wide-ranging, and varied enough to keep Kyp challenged and properly engaged in both his practice and his learning – can be made, so that Kyp can continue his training at a pace that’s more suited to his potential, instead of just coasting along without ever really needing to try very hard to keep up.

 **12.) Bad:** Since almost all of the training groups on Naboo are made based primarily on age and only secondarily on actual talents or range of power and it’s not like he’s being forced to give up being in a working, melded circle of Force-users with his brothers or anything, the only really bad thing about having a new Master with a new teaching regime and a new training group is that he’s kept so busy that he mostly has to give up on his penchant for randomly wandering off down to the local marketplaces and finding somewhere to sit where he can observe (undetected) the comings and goings of the crowds for hours and hours on end; he enjoys the new, more challenging pace of learning, though, so he considers it a fairly good trade, all things considered.

 **13.) Kiss:** Kyp receives his very first kiss that’s not from a family member (or someone who might as well be family) when he’s not quite seven years old, after chasing one of the pretty neighborhood girls (Arasna Rishma, a pale-skinned, fair-haired, light-eyed girl who’s not quite a handful of months younger than he is) through one of the light falls of snow that accompany Naboo’s brief winter: it’s warm and soft and nice and oddly comforting, and, later on, when he imagines himself kissing the girl’s older brother, purely for comparison’s sake, and it feels like stars just exploded in the pit of his stomach, he’s pretty darn sure that he’s going to grow up to be one of those individuals who, as the local pilots put it, will happily jink and juke for both sides of the squadron.

 **14.) Strike:** The first time someone hits him and it’s not just a glancing instructive blow landed during training (either to motivate him into improving his reflexes or else to help teach him how to best response to a certain kind of attack) or a lucky hit taken in a friendly (or not so friendly) sparring match, Kyp is eight and a half years old and still just a little bit too young and too sure of himself to be able to realize quite quickly enough that he and a few very young handmaidens are really no match for a whole squadron of trained mercenaries who’ve been specifically sent to Naboo to kidnap the current Princess of Theed, and he’s so busy responding to the most obvious threats and deflecting those blows that he never even senses the person sneaking up behind him with a stun gun before the strike comes that sends him plummeting down into unconsciousness.

 **15.) Save:** The first time he meets Luke Kenobi-Skywalker, he’s a little bit too preoccupied with the whole being rescued by being bodily picked up and hauled off while slung over someone’s shoulder thing to really notice the young man attached to that shoulder all that much: later, though, when they’re huddled together tight, _tight_ , **_tight_** in the cramped dark space of a storage unit, concentrating fiercely on masking their presences in the Force and, thus, on hiding from searches both physical and mental, and Kyp is basically plastered all over his rescuer, he has a chance to really process both what’s going on (he’s being saved!) and the _feel_ of Luke in the Force, resonating bright and strong and familiar and _right_ , and it occurs to him that he could get used to this kind of thing, especially if it continues to include such closeness . . .

 **16.) Harm:** He _likes_ Gaeriel Captison– she strikes him as being a warm person, someone bright and funny and kind and intelligent – right up until the moment when Luke comes into the room and she turns around with a blinding smile and the two of them sort of flow together into an embrace so natural and loving and _unexpected_ that he feels like someone has sucker-punched him in the gut and is taking advantage of his shock and pain to drive hooks into his heart and tear out jagged hunks and pieces of it, and it hurts him so much, so acutely, that he’s pretty darn sure Gaeriel couldn’t have caused him more harm even if she actually had attacked him physically.

 **17.) Confusion:** He is pitifully unable to hide either his hurt, his confusion, or his sense of betrayal from Zeth – the youngest of his older brothers knows him far too well for him for that – and so Zeth ends up holding him close, rocking him comfortingly in the circle of his arms (the way he used to when they were little and Kyp had a bad dream), while Kyp cries himself out, and trying to make him feel better by insisting that Kyp is really too young to be able to recognize his soul’s potential mate yet, no matter what he thinks his heart might be telling him now, and staunchly declaring that if Luke Kenobi-Skywalker is so painfully blind that he can’t see how much better Kyp is than any random girl from Bakura could ever possibly be, then he most certainly doesn’t and never could deserve Kyp; unfortunately, Kyp is so sure of what he _feels_ , what he _senses_ and _knows_ , all the way down to the very core of him, that his brother’s reassuring words wash over him and make no more impression upon him than rain running down a windowpane might, leaving him filled with a painful sense of longing and a nagging feeling that the Force has, for whatever reason, chosen to make him the butt of an extremely nasty joke.

 **18.) Focus:** The only way Kyp can stop himself from thinking (or dreaming) about Luke or dwelling on the agony brought to him by the knowledge that Luke is with Gaeriel is if he’s too busy to entertain stray thoughts and too exhausted at night to dream, and so Kyp throws himself with almost violent urgency into his training, his narrowed focus allowing him to push so much harder that he progresses so rapidly in his training regime that he swiftly outstrips the pace at which the rest of his group is operating and the Master in charge of his training group is forced to move him to a different group of much older students, in an attempt to satisfy Kyp’s rather vehement desire to be allowed to carry on at his new rate and not be slowed down by those who aren’t able to keep up with him.

 **19.) Stun:** He’s nine, the first time he hurts himself channeling too much of the Force at once, the power overloading his system and flooding his flesh with excess energy, making his body convulse as if a dozen stun guns have all been jammed up against him and discharged at once and sending his awareness tumbling down into darkness: he wakes in a hospital bed, his momma crying softly somewhere in the background, to find his papa looking at him like he’s not sure he knows Kyp anymore, the twins regarding him with a look of mixed shock, lingering fright, and the first vague stirrings of anger, and Zeth staring at him with eyes that are almost black with pity and with fury, and, though he makes all the right noises to indicate that he understands and will abide by his family’s desire to slow down and stop pushing after everything as quickly as he has been, he has no intention whatsoever of slowing down and hardens his heart determinedly against all pleas and exhortations to rest for at least a little while and to be more careful, for he’s also awakened with images of the future he wants – and which he is increasingly convinced he will never have, given Luke’s recent formal marriage to Gaeriel and their not exactly well-kept intention to have a large family of their own – dancing behind his eyelids, and his disgust with himself and disillusioned anger with the Force and the galaxy in general is such that he’s quite sure he’d go insane, if he were to stop trying to exhaust himself past the point of feeling his pain.

 **20.) Expect:** Word comes quickly (as expected) that Gaeriel is pregnant and Kyp finally gets his old wish, in a way he’s never expected: he dreams of two pretty little girls (similar looking but not identical) with fair, slightly reddish hair and mismatched light eyes rushing up and throwing themselves enthusiastically around his legs, their heads reaching no higher than halfway past his knees, and clamoring loudly for "Uncle Kyp" to "fly us, fly us!" and, waking with the Force thrumming certainty in his blood like the vibrating beat of a bass drum, throws himself from the bed and lunges for the ’fresher, where he doesn’t get any further than the sink before his stomach violently twists and he is forced to quite noisily empty its contents into the gleaming basin.

 **21.) Scare:** Kyp is almost ten when he’s kidnapped a second time, and this time he’s the primary target, rather than just someone taken along for the ride as a way of causing some possible collateral damage: he’s never been more shocked or more scared in his life than when he wakes, after having collapsed in exhaustion across his own bed, faced not with the familiar surroundings of his own bedroom but instead locked in restraints (so tight that he can barely move) fashioned in such a way that the metal has somehow been reinforced with the Force and suspended within a tight bubble of energy formed out of the Force in such a way as to somehow keep him from being able to do anything with the Force (despite all of his much-lauded strength in the Force and his myriad abilities and talents) other than to dimly sense the Force coursing through the cuffs chaining him and the Dark storms of hideous power centered in the bodies of the two beautiful but somehow sinister (and strangely, naggingly familiar, as if he’s seen their faces before somewhere, sometime) brunettes smiling at him knowingly, and that shock and fright ramps quickly up past horror and confusion and into outright terror when those two smiling women laugh and tell him, chiming voices twining together in ominous synchronicity, "Once upon a time, beautiful boy, you would have been the only person left in all the galaxy with working knowledge of the Sun Crusher, the knowledge of how to make it and how to use it locked away in the depths of your fearful mind. Since the Qwi Xux of this time has proven useless to us, that leaves only you. Use the Force to find the time when you would have held that knowledge, beautiful boy, and then give it to us, and we might just be moved to persuade Tarkin to avoid using his latest toy to reduce Naboo to a tangle of broken rubble and burning plasma while your family is still on that world."

 **22.) Comfort:** The pain is incredible, the echoing heights to which the two witches – Our Ladies of Pain, as they insist is their rightful title: the Dark Goddess of Suffering and the Dark Goddess of Despair – are capable of driving him before finally allowing the agony to break his awareness open and plunge him down into unconsciousness again quite simply terrible (horrible, awful, horrifying) beyond anything he could have ever even imagined, before, and he finds himself shocked, in the few moments of uninterrupted lucidity that come in between the rounds of torture, that he hasn’t simply gone mad yet – especially given the things that they’ve told him, the things that they’ve shown him, in the Force, and the things that he has also _seen_ and been unable to deny the truth of, in that horrible "once upon a time" of theirs – and he finds himself clinging with surprising fervor to the memory of his previous savior, holding the image of Luke and the way that Luke felt to him, in the Force, close to the forefront of his mind, drawing comfort and strength from his recollections, as if the remembrances of Luke alone could somehow be enough to protect and shield him from the insane depravities of these witches.

 **23.) Cage:** They hold him for over half a year; yet, in the end, despite what seems like an entire planet of fanatical followers who’re more than willing to fling themselves in between their Dark mistresses and any hint of a threat against them, the witches and their citadel are no match for Luke and his family and friends, for Luke, Leia, and the Experimentals and their bonded mates and closest friends eventually lead an attack on the witches’ bastion that looses an entire battalion of Force-sensitive soldiers on the fanatics and their Dark leaders, and, even though one of the witches escapes cleanly in the confusion, Luke catches the second one in the act of attempting to move Kyp, restraints and Force-bubble and all, so that he can be carried off with them as the two witches flee the battle, so that Kyp gets to watch through watering eyes as, for a moment, Luke draws so deeply on the Force that he flares so blindingly bright with energy that it almost appears as if there isn’t even a living person there anymore but only a high-fountaining jet of glaring _white_ light, the solid form of his rescuer sliding back into view with a blinding tangle of energy manipulated into being by the raw power of the Force alone gathered in his left hand: when the witch tries to make a mad dash for it, Luke gestures with that hand, and she slams to a violent stop as if she’s hit an invisible wall, her body shaking and spasming as green sparks fly out from that net of bright energy in Luke’s outstretched hand and coruscate around her until, enveloped by spitting and sparking lines of virulent green power like a tree wrapped in a sheet of flame, she falls, her death abruptly freeing Kyp from his cage and dropping him limply into the floor, broken chains rattling around him.

 **24.) Portal:** Leia catches up with her twin – skidding in behind him with a blazing blue-green lightsaber held ignited at high guard before her, just in time to have to thumb it off so she can rush forward and catch Luke as the web of Force-energies around his left hand winks out of existence and he staggers in reaction to the sheer amount of power he’s just channeled – and Luke flashes her a quick smile, taking advantage of her presence to brush against her thoughts and pour the knowledge of what he’s done and what he intends to do directly into his twin’s mind, before rushing forward to unceremoniously scoop Kyp up out of the floor and into his arms, after which he reaches back out into the Force again, gathering enough power to himself to carve a doorway into being between the bowels of the witches’ citadel and not Kyp’s home, on Naboo, but rather Luke’s home, in the Jedi Bendu chapterhouse on Alderaan (which honestly isn’t really just another chapterhouse so much as it is the unofficial heart of the New Jedi Bendu Order, though technically the old Temple on Coruscant is still the home of the Grand Masters), and then rushes them through, urgently raising voice and mind to call out for his fathers and for Healers even before he’s got Kyp halfway through the portal.

 **25.) Sleep:** After all the damage his body’s sustained, it damn well _hurts_ , being picked up and carried around, but it’s _Luke_ who’s holding on to him, and so he’s (at least mostly) alright with it . . . right up until the moment when a Healer tries to take him away from Luke, at which point he completely loses it, wailing wordlessly as he blasts the strange woman back away from him and then continuing to keen in fear, clinging to Luke mindlessly and lashing out at everyone who tries to approach them, until finally Anakin Skywalker shouts, "Bring him over here!" and Luke dashes across the room to the indicated bed, agilely twisting about in mid-stride so that he turns and tumbles backwards onto the mattress, falling so that his fathers bookend him to either side, thus bringing Kyp close enough so that Obi-Wan and Anakin can reach Kyp through the Force by funneling their power down into him directly through Luke, silencing his continued shrieks and essentially putting him into a deep sleep by deliberately pouring a raging tumult of healing power straight into him and flooding him with that energy until his body automatically shuts down and goes deep into a healing trance.

 **26.) Wake:** Luke seems to think that it’s perfectly normal for Kyp to have panicked the way he did, after all that he’s been through and the sudden shock of being hauled out of the witches’ dungeon and into the middle of the Alderaanian chapterhouse – in fact, after he wakes up again, instead of having to deal with an interrogation about his overreaction to that poor Healer’s attempt to take him away from Luke, as he’d been more than half fearing would happen, Kyp is, to his unending relief, forced to sit by while a painfully earnest Luke apologizes for not having warned Kyp first, before hauling him out of there like he did – and, as far as Kyp’s concerned, Luke can darn well keep thinking that it was just the shock of having a strange person try to take him away from his rescuer that made him panic like he did, and his fathers (Team or no Team!) can take their curious glances and their private knowing looks and go jump in the nearest lake!

 **27.) Problem:** He doesn’t seem to be able to consciously recall a lot of the details of what the witches did to him; he has a sinking suspicion, though, that he may have finally done something that allowed him to get the information about the Sun Crusher that the witches wanted from him so badly and, worse, that he may have even told it to them before Luke managed to save him, so he is trying to work up the nerve to ask someone to please take a look around in his mind for the answer to that particular question when the Force quite suddenly seems to scream, as if billions of voices had all suddenly cried out in terror . . . and then just as abruptly been silenced, and they have a whole other, much more immediate problem on their hands.

 **28.) Solution:** When Tarkin decides to prove just how capable his "latest toy" is of reducing a planet to broken rubble (much as the witches intimated) and just how well the so-called Tarkin Doctrine of enforcing rule through absolute terror actually works, the famous Team is likewise forced to stop trying to find a solution to the mystery that is Kyp Durron, and he finds himself torn between being ashamed for the brief flash of relief he felt, when those penetrating eyes finally turned away from him, being furious with himself, for not having pressed the point of Tarkin’s supposed planet-breaking "toy" harder (since he’d clearly remembered the witches essentially threatening Naboo’s continued existence with it, to try to get him to cooperate), and being absolutely terrified, at the thought that this "toy" of Tarkin’s is apparently considered far less fun by the agony-loving witches than the Sun Crusher superweapon that they were torturing him in order to gain enough knowledge of to be able to build one of them for themselves.

 **29.) Sanity:** Apparently, though he managed to keep his sanity intact while the witches were torturing him, all of the other Jedi Bendu have recently gone insane, for they quite seriously seem to be planning to go after Tarkin’s superweapon with nothing more than a handful of ships jammed with squadrons of single-being starfighters and small Jedi fighters and some weird technology that Kyp’s never even heard of before (which freaks him out, because honestly, if gravity well projectors and interdiction fields work so well, then why hasn’t he heard of them before and, more importantly, why isn’t everyone using them in space battles?), so they can pin this so-called Death Star into an area of space it won’t be able to flee from easily (since the interdiction fields generated by gravity well projectors supposedly make it impossible for any ship, no matter what size it might be, to make the jump to hyperspace from inside the area covered by that interdiction field), so that the fighters can then swarm the battlestation – flying too close to it for its planet-breaking superlaser or largest turbolasers to be able to target them – until someone manages to get close enough to target a small, unshielded thermal exhaust port (only two meters wide, for stars’ sakes!) underneath the main port, which, according to Obi-Wan, is the single greatest flaw and vulnerable point in the design of the superweapon, and should, given a direct hit down the exhaust port from a proton torpedo, trigger a chain reaction of overloads and explosions that are _theoretically capable_ of destroying the entire Death Star.

 **30.) Insanity:** Force take it, he’s nearly eleven years old, he’s strong in the Force and a damned good pilot (everyone on Naboo says so, even the people who don’t necessarily like him!), his body is pretty well recovered from the wringer those two witches put it through (it’s been over a month since Luke rescued him, for pity’s sake! Gaeriel’s already starting to show, and she’d only just revealed that she was pregnant again – hence, her decision not to join the mission to rescue him, as she has taken some pains to inform him, evidently not wishing for him to think ill of her for not being with Luke and Leia and the others when they stormed the witches’ fortress, for reasons he cannot even begin to fathom – right before they figured out where the witches were holding him), and, by the Great Lady Asherah, if they think he’s going to just sit quietly back and take this insanity lying down, they have another thing coming, because still technically recovering or not and too young to take part in a war or not, he is damn well going to go with them and help make sure that Luke survives this insane plan of his fathers’ whether anyone wants him to or not!

 **31.) Implode:** He does manage to sneak aboard the biggest of the squadron-carrying capital ships, but they catch him before he can claim one of the single-pilot Jedi fighters for himself for the actual mission and absolutely refuse to let him pilot one of those ships; fortunately, though, that doesn’t end up mattering too much, because as long as he can actually still see the battle as it’s taking place, he can reach out into the Force and use it to jam the rotating turrets of the Death Star’s turbolasers to keep them from tracking accurately as they try to turn to fire on the attacking pilots, use the Force to distract/influence the pilots of the (thankfully) distinctively shaped enemy TIE Fighters so that they either fly into each other or else get too close to the surface of the Death Star and end up crashing into it, and even use the Force to physically crumple the barrels of the smaller (well, relatively speaking, compared to the heavy banks of turbolasers) ion and laser canons, so that the weapons misfire and implode violently when their gunners try to target the attacking fighters.

 **32.) Explode:** The Death Star has a much larger compliment of fighters than they must’ve been counting on (later, when it’s all said and done, he’ll learn that it’s estimated between six and ten thousand starfighters and between three and five thousand assault shuttles alone were crammed into berths on the battlestation), and, despite everything he’s doing to take out the turbolasers and canons and some unbelievable shooting from Jedi Bendu Masters like Obi-Wan and Anakin, things are starting to look a bit dicey when, all of a sudden, the _Millennium Falcon_ comes screaming in to the midst of the battle from Asherah alone only knows where, picks off a trio of TIE Fighters whose pilots all have minds too strong for Kyp to force away from the pursuit of Luke, and leaves Luke in the open to fire the shot that, after a few pulse-pounding moments of fearful anticipation, does in fact set off a chain reaction of explosions that not only breaks the Death Star open along its equatorial trench like a cracked egg but sets off its main hypermatter reactor too, sparking an explosion so vast, so powerful, so all-consuming, that Han and Luke both get their undersides scorched, trying to pull up away from the Death Star in time to avoid being swallowed by its death throes, and there’s so little left of the superweapon that Kyp seriously doubts it would be worth the effort to attempt to harvest the debris cloud for scrap.

 **33.) Old:** He’s never heard of a Jedi Bendu being able to create a portal large enough for a ship like the _Millennium Falcon_ (which is essentially thirty-five by not quite twenty-six by basically nine meters) to get through, but somehow Leia and Han managed it, and he’s so busy cheering himself hoarse that he can’t even feel too bad for not being a part of the three-way clench that Han and Leia and Luke end up in, after landing on the massive attack cruiser _Integrity_ – an old capital ship of the Republic Navy and, more specifically, a _Venator_ -class Star Destroyer that, once upon a time, served as the flagship of the expanded Open Circle Armada (which, ironically enough, came to be commanded by Commodore Lorth Neda two decades after the then Lieutenant Commander captained the much smaller _Carrack-_ classlight cruiser _Integrity_ of Home Fleet Strike Group Five, during the Battle of Courscant, at the end of the Clone Wars) – which was specifically volunteered to Obi-Wan and Anakin to act as a staging platform for the heart of their Jedi forces in the battle against the Death Star.

 **34.) Young:** Unlike some folk, Kyp’s not entirely crazy, and so he’s doing his best to use the cover of all the wild cheering and celebration to slip carefully away, before anyone else can see him, when Han Solo’s rather incredulous (and far too loud) voice rings out across the hangar, demanding, "Hey, Kid! Ain’t you a little young to’ve been invited to this party?" and effectively freezing him in his tracks.

 **35.) Congratulate:** Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite plainly _not amused_ (not even a little) with Kyp’s stowaway routine and Luke seems torn between being shocked over his fearless audacity and simply angry that he’s there while Leia just looks horrified to see him, but Anakin surprises him by bursting out into loud gales of guffaws and leaning over to whisper something in Obi-Wan’s ear that makes the rapidly brewing storms in the Jedi Bendu’s mesmeric oceanic eyes just as suddenly calm, their edges crinkling up in amusement, and prompts a solemn and rather cryptic pronouncement of, "Ah, another instance of a Talz attempting to call attention to a Wookiee’s fur. Luke, Leia, remember Honoghr?" which leaves the twins blushing and quiet as their fathers turn to congratulate Han and Chewie on their impeccable timing and gives Kyp the opportunity to finish slipping away.

 **36.) Lambast:** He’s contemplating whether or not he’ll be in even more trouble than he already is if he just simply "borrows" a fighter to fly back to Naboo on his own when a hard-eyed Luke finally tracks him down and lights into him, lambasting him for his reckless foolishness and selfishness in insisting on putting himself in harm’s way in a situation dire enough that no one could’ve been spared to try to get him safely out, if things had gone wrong, and, essentially, putting Kyp through a verbal wringer until finally he gets tired of being yelled at and furiously shouts back, "Who the hell do you think was responsible for disarming all of those turbolasers and cannons, you blind idiot? Just because I’m younger than you are that doesn’t mean I can’t use the Force to help even the odds in a battle, you sanctimonious ass! I’m every bit as strong in the Force as most of those other Jedi pilots, if not more, and if it’s alright for them to fly with you on a mission like this, then I’ve just as much right as they do and you do to try to get myself killed fighting insane odds in a battle against something as evil as a Death Star!" unfortunately not noticing that they’ve gained an audience until after he’s finished yelling and Han has started laughing in a matter not unlike the way Anakin was laughing, earlier, before that mysterious whispered comment to Obi-Wan that somehow defused his anger over Kyp’s presence.

 **37.) Demand:** He’s seriously considering the possible logistics of just demanding that the Force open up and swallow him when Han surprises him by walking over and casually slinging an arm across his shoulders, winking at him in a conspicuously conspiring manner as he cheerfully advises, "Don’t give Junior here any mind, Kid, he and his sister have been disobeying orders and doing their best to get their fool selves shot since they were about two: he’s just letting off some steam now ’cause you scared him, is all. He’ll get over it. And if he doesn’t, Leia’ll talk at him about how unbecoming it is of a Jedi Bendu to be a hypocrite until he feels so bad about it, he’ll have to come apologize to you. Come on. Wanna get outta here? I promise not to scold. Smuggler’s honor!"

 **38.) Offer:** Kyp decides that he likes Han Solo a helluva lot more than he does mister holier-than-thou Luke Kenobi-Skywalker (at least at the moment, anyway), and happily goes off with the grinning man, smiling back at him unreservedly when he offers to show Kyp around the _Falcon_ and maybe see if he can convince Chewie to swing by Naboo to refuel and restock, so they can give him a ride home and he won’t be stuck cooling his jets, waiting around for the Jedi Bendu to stop being so distracted by the forces of evil that they can finally get their act together enough to remember that they still need to get him safely back to his family again.

 **39.) Hard:** He tries very hard to just kick back and enjoy the ride home on the _Millennium Falcon_ , but he can’t stop thinking about the warning Obi-Wan gave him when he pulled him aside for a moment, just before their departure from the battle group – "Be wary of your anger, young one. You’ve seen what you could have become, given circumstances where you gave in to your anger and your fear. Trust in the Force. You’ve crossed this family’s path for a purpose. Your time will come." – and the confusion effortlessly sparked by that cryptic remark about how his "time will come" makes it very hard for him to stop fretting about what Obi-Wan could’ve possibly meant, which puts a considerable damper on his ability to relax . . . at least up until the point where Han gives him a crooked grin and offers to take him home by way of Corellia first (seeing as how his folks aren’t exactly expecting him at any set time), so he can say he’s seen the Five Brothers up close and personal, and it becomes impossible to avoid the infectious nature of the captain’s lopsided smile.

 **40.) Easy:** Han is . . . Corellia is . . . Asherah bless and protect his family and keep such a thing from ever becoming so, but if it should ever come to pass that he should be in need of a second father or another life, _this_ is the father and _this_ is the life that he wants, and, despite the captain’s easy-going manner, somehow Kyp gets the feeling that it’s a sentiment Han Solo would not only understand but would agree with enough to insist on making it a reality for him, if it should ever actually come to that (though Asherah keep it from ever being so!).

 **41.) Steam:** His parents are so utterly floored by Han’s firm insistence that they might want to think about getting Kyp a Jedi Minder to help him work through any lingering issues from having been held prisoner by two wannabe Sith witches and tortured constantly for _over six months_ **_before_** they start shouting at him for getting himself involved in the battle to take out the Death Star that, miracle upon miracles, he actually makes Kyp’s mother (who’s painfully obviously worked up a more than full head of steam) visibly deflate and embrace him tearfully instead of exploding into a furious lecture, and even Zeth (who’s clenched hands are shaking with repressed anger) turns pale and gets very still and calm and just mutters something about how it’s great to have Kyp back safe again, rather than yelling at Kyp about what an idiot he is.

 **42.) Chill:** It’s a relief, at first, not to get (metaphorically) raked over the coals and roasted alive for having been crazy enough to stow away on the _Integrity_ when he knew where it was heading and why, but after awhile the extra cheery carefulness of his parents as they avoid all mention of the subject whatsoever, the chilly reception of the twins, and the positively cold shoulder from Zeth gets old, and he ends up blowing up one evening in the middle of dinner, shouting that just because he’s the baby of the family that doesn’t mean that he’s a baby and they can all damn well stop babying him any time now, seeing as how he thinks it’s pretty damned obvious he’s not all that easy to break, seeing as how he survived everything the Ladies of Pain threw at him in the months they held him prisoner without shattering.

 **43.) Learn:** The Jedi Minder, as he eventually learns, is a Jedi Bendu Soul Healer, too, which, technically speaking, makes her a Jedi Mind Healer, and he surprises himself by not only getting along fairly well with her but actually liking her, as a person, and he’s as shocked as anything when it occurs to him that he’s actually started to look forward to their sessions together, even if he doesn’t ever plan on telling her about just how strong the pull is that he feels, in the Force, towards a certain idiot by the name of Luke Kenobi-Skywalker (who was actually angry enough with him to hold back on apologizing until after he’d already left and ended up having to comm the _Falcon_ in order to rather sheepishly admit he was sorry for the way he overreacted to Kyp’s decision to stow away on the _Integrity_ ).

 **44.) Forget:** According to Nirena, it’s not necessarily a good idea for Kyp to be trying as hard as he is to make himself remember every single detail of what happened to him throughout his entire imprisonment, especially considering how much of it he’s actually forgotten and given the fact that the mind often protects itself against further harm by deliberately forgetting or locking certain memories away so that they are no longer consciously accessible and, thus, can no longer inflict further hurt on the already damaged psyche; yet, though he tries very hard to come to grips with the fact that there are probably at least some things that he’s better off not knowing, he can’t help but be bothered by the gaps in his memory (he even has nightmares, sometimes, about the memory gaps being caused by literal holes the witches burned into his brain), and it especially disturbs him that he has no real notion of whether or not he actually told those thrice-damned witches about the plans for the Sun Crusher, since that creeping suspicion that he somehow or another figured out a way to get the information they wanted has never really gone away.

 **45.) Strangle:** When Zeth finally corners him about Luke and earnestly proceeds to launch into some long-winded spiel about normal schoolboy crushes and hero-worship and transference and how strong bonds can form between individuals in situations involving intense pressure, Kyp’s first urge, frankly, is to strangle his obviously well-meaning brother with the cord on the nearby drapery; yet, because he knows his brother loves him and worries about him, he instead does something that he’s been wanting to do for a good long while and, reaching out to Zeth carefully through the Force, dumps every single feeling of familiarity (like coming home) and completion he’s felt from being around Luke and all those blasted sensations of _rightness_ he gets from Luke through the Force directly into his brother’s mind, in the process making Zeth stop talking and shut his mouth so quickly that Kyp is frankly kind of amazed that Zeth doesn’t end up biting off the tip of his tongue and has to strangle the noise that wants to rise up in the back of his throat, to keep from bursting into laughter over his brother’s suddenly stunned and bewildered appearance.

 **46.) Breathe:** He’s _just_ starting to feel like things are getting back to normal in his family again when his idiotic twin brothers abruptly seem to decide that they’re worried enough about Tarkin’s apparently unending nefarious plans to conquer the known galaxy (since unfortunately the man doesn’t seem to have had the good grace to die when Luke blew up his damned toy) that they’re going to celebrate their twenty-third birthday by moving to Courscant and enlisting in the branch of the NAR army that’s solely for Force-sensitives: the first person Kyp comms (at least half hysterical, because Asherah take it all, despite their fascination with hand-to-hand combat, Cel and Cal are actually two of the gentlest people he knows, and how in the nine hells of Corellia do they think they’re ever going to be able to live with themselves if they actually ever have to kill another sentient being?) is Han, and, though he’s near to panicking at the thought of his brothers being in the army, when Han promises him that he’ll take care of it and make sure that the people who need to know are all aware of the fact that these are Kyp Durron’s oldest brothers, somehow, Kyp believes Han and trusts his reassurances that Han’s friends will either see to it that the twins are placed somewhere that they can’t do any real damage (including to themselves) or else arrange to have their applications be firmly but tactfully rejected, and that’s enough to let him calm back down and remember how to breathe properly again.

 **47.) Warn:** When he turns thirteen, the Master in charge of teaching his training group takes him aside to warn him that he’s going to need to seriously consider seeing about arranging to move to a chapterhouse with more full Jedi Bendu Masters if he wants to continue to learn more about the Force and his own talents and to advance at much the same rate he has been recently; again, the first person he comms is Han, who lets him vacillate wildly between panicking, crowing, and complaining for about half an hour before he finally cuts in to rather bluntly note that it’s not like Kyp’s parents can (or even would) blame him for turning out to be as strong as both of them together and that they know that he’s strong in the Force and have always insisted that he should be fully trained so that no one will have to worry about a lack of control on his part proving to be of danger to anyone (or anything) and so really Kyp should be talking to them about maybe either relocating to Alderaan for awhile or else sending him to Alderaan for something like what amounts to a special university for Jedi Bendu prodigies, and Han can always ask Leia if she knows of a Master who’s thinking about putting together another training group with enough power to be able to easily crack a world in half like an egg, if Kyp is that worried about finding someone able and willing to teach him.

 **48.) Encourage:** His parents have always tried to encourage him in his studies and his practicing – though they’ve surely worried (often quite seriously) about how hard and how quickly Kyp pushes himself, especially since his kidnappings, they’ve certainly never tried to stop him from pursuing his training and, in fact, have always told him that gaining the proper control of his phenomenal powers and abilities is, quite possibly, the most important thing for him to do and something that he should be devoting himself to achieving with all diligence and seriousness – and they’ve known since he was a youngling that he’d probably have to train with the Masters of a larger Temple at some point (though, privately, he suspects that they were hoping it would not happen until much later in his life, when they could’ve sent him to wherever he needed to go, like proud parents sending a teenager away to university, without feeling as though they should uproot the entire family to go along with him), so Han’s right about them not exactly being able to protest against the notion of him going to Alderaan; however, they can (and apparently intend to) see to it that there is a delay between agreeing that he should go and actually seeing to it that he arrives at the chapterhouse, their concern over the way he’s been pushing himself lately so great that they’ve decided to send him to visit Han for a little while first, for a little vacation of sorts, while they make all the arrangements necessary to smoothly relocate the entire family to Alderaan, so that they can be with him for at least the first three or so years of his residency in the chapterhouse there.

 **49.) Simple:** It’s supposed to be just a simple visit to a friend – some time off from his hectic schedule, rather vehemently enforced by parents increasingly worried about the amount of time he’s been devoting to his own private practicing and study, rather than sleeping or wasting his time by mucking about socially, and agreed to only because he would actually like to see Han again for awhile (and because, when he tried to complain, he was informed that Luke Kenobi-Skywalker himself was the one who suggested the vacation and arranged all the details with Han, when his parents expressed some concerns about sending Kyp into an environment where he would be expected to push himself to excel, when he was already pushing himself so hard and so rapidly that they feared he hardly ever slept anymore) and, at the time, it sounded to him like whatever minor thing Han was supposed to be helping to look into for the Corellian government and law enforcement sounded boring enough that Han would probably appreciate the excuse to take some time off to entertain a visitor – not some headlong plunge into a web of corruption and deceit and lawlessness with ties to Tarkin and his humanocentric tripe; he’s not about to protest an adventure, though, especially not one that could see him actually put some of his hard won skills to good practical use in the fight against evil, so he’s along for the ride, no matter what happens or where they might end up, and he’s quite sure he’ll have no regrets over insisting on going with Han, either, when all’s said and done.

 **50.) Complex:** They follow the trail of clues and unravel the complex ties of alliances (and paid for muscle) until finally they’re led back to a world that Kyp’s not really all that sure he’d ever even heard of, before, outside of the (very, very) little that he learned about it when he studied the Clone Wars (since there was a battle won there by Master Windu in the first year of the war) – or in any case, he’s absolutely positive that he knows nothing useful about either the world or the people – and it is here, on Dantooine, that he receives a terrible, wonderful shock, while attempting to help Han infiltrate the secret laboratory complex of the insane scientist Jenna Zan Arbor: he runs into a youngling who _feels_ so much like his father and his brothers (or even himself), in the Force, that (once he’s recovered his equilibrium a little) he almost expects to hear it, when the boy finally admits that his name is Khaarmas Gildon Durron and that his parents actually did give up their firstborn child (a boy named Kelcenric) to the Jedi Order for training, several years before he was ever born, and so is ready to catch hold of the youngling and hold him tight, when he halfway collapses, sobbing in surprise and relief, to learn that he is not alone in the ’verse any longer and that not only does he, in fact, still have some blood kin left alive, but that Kyp, as a representative of the Durron family, will gladly take Khaarmas home to be welcomed by the rest of the boy’s previously thought lost eldest brother’s family; afterwards, no one’s really sure who was more surprised, over the discovery of his extremely young (not even six yet, for stars’ sakes!) uncle (though in retrospect it seems fairly obvious that someone really should’ve thought to check the sealed records kept on Kyp’s father by the old Jedi Order and investigated to see if he had any other family members who might’ve been strong enough in the Force to merit training as Jedi Bendu, given how hugely strong in the Force Kyp is and how solid and useful the talents and abilities of his father and his brothers all are), since at the time everyone is just so happy that the boy’s alive and that he looks as though he’s going to stay that way for quite some time longer that really there’s not a whole lot of room for any other emotions, except maybe for relief.

 **51.) Brave:** Afterwards, he will declare that his uncle (and isn’t it just the most bizarre feeling, to be referring to a boy roughly eight years his junior as his uncle!) isn’t just an extremely lucky little boy, but that he’s also a heartbreakingly brave youngling: having survived the ravaging of his world by invasion and war, the violent deaths of essentially all of his family (or at least all of the family that he’d known for sure that he had), his capture by the enemy and selection by that bitch Jenna Zan Arbor as yet another one of her Force-sensitive experimental subjects, and the Force alone only knows how much pain and suffering and humiliation (as not only a virtual slave but also as what amounted to a glorified lab rat) before he happened to have a chance to make common cause with a teenager who would, of all things, turn out to be the youngest son of his eldest brother, he’s not only so indomitable of spirit that he’s determined to fight until his world is free, he’s also so determined not to let what he’s gone through change him from the kind of person he has been – the kind of person he claims his parents could be proud of – that he behaves as though what he went through were nothing all that special, as if it’s normal for a young child to survive such horrors and, rather than abandoning hope and allowing a madwoman like Zan Arbor to treat him as if he were no more sentient or irreplaceable than a somewhat interesting rock, refuse to give up or to stop fighting and actually even figure out a way to resist from within what amounted to a glorified cage, passing information to the underground resistance movement and hacking into computer systems to reroute personnel and supplies and alter commissions and orders so that provisions and troops would never be in quite the right places in the right numbers and the laboratory complex that served as his prison wouldn’t be nearly as well protected (much less impregnable!) as it was thought to be by those who willingly worked within it, safety measures and soldiers or not, and his sheer stubborn courageousness and adaptability (and ability to let things go, without dwelling on them overly much or allowing himself to become embittered) is such that Kyp can’t help but feel that, in comparison to this child’s undeniably difficult and painful life, his own existence has, to date, been both relatively sheltered and even easy, in a way, the shattering of his heart and that encounter with the Ladies of Pain aside.

 **52.) Cowardly:** Han told them quite firmly to stay put at the base and stay out of trouble and out of the way and to be _safe_ , so he wouldn’t have to worry about them, too, on top of everything else (including a rather risky plan that could conceivably go very badly sideways), during the final battle; Khaarmas and Kyp both agreed that staying behind when so very much was at stake and so many good beings were risking their lives on one final push to free the planet would be so contemptuously cowardly that their honor would never recover from the shame of it, though, and so instead they told Han that they would stay safe, and then they finessed some hasty repairs on a fighter thought to be too badly damaged to fix in time for the fight and proceeded to sneak their way out of the base and in to the battle, at the back of the last wave of fighters, so that they could do their part to make sure that the plan worked and Dantooine would finally be fully freed again.

 **53.) Unhappy:** At the time, Han couldn’t protest or even complain too much about their rather blatant disobedience without seeming ungrateful (after all, they did successfully help to guard his six, on those last few runs, and they also saved the lives of more than a few of the other pilots with their fast flying and highly accurate shooting, all without coming to any harm); he makes up for it afterwards, though, lecturing the both of them (though he spends more time reprimanding Kyp, knowing how bad he is about charging headfirst into dangerous situations) not only for lying to him but for making Han into a liar as well, since he’d not only promised Kyp’s family to keep them both safe but specifically told Luke and Leia that he’d keep them safely out of the final fight . . . which they both agree, afterwards, is a far worse act (however accidental it might’ve been) than simply fibbing about staying safe, and which, in turn, accounts for their extra good behavior on the trip home, as neither one of them has any desire to make Han even more unhappy with them or to make his family mad at him because of something they’ve done.

 **54.) Happy:** The moment Khaarmas meets Shmei’la, the eldest of Luke and Gaeri’s girls, it’s as though the final two pieces of a puzzle have suddenly clicked together to create a perfect whole: the way they complement each other in nature and the way the sense of their beings in the Force just harmonize and balance one another so absolutely, so flawlessly, is almost eerily perfect, in a way that strongly reminds Kyp of Obi-Wan and Anakin and even Han and Leia, as though something somehow lacking in each individual is supplied only by the presence of the other, as if they would both be incomplete and in some way not only diminished but actively damaged by the absence of the other; yet, though Kyp is certainly happy that his uncle has apparently found the true mate of his soul (and at such an incredibly young age, too), he cannot help but remember how strong the sensation of belonging, of fitting, of matching, and how overwhelming the sense of _rightness_ had been, when he’s first met Luke, and also feel a sense of bitter sorrow and despair, since he knows (not just wistfully believes or hopes but _knows_ , with everything that is in him, in precisely the same way that he _knows_ the Force and can _sense_ both its power and its will) that the one who is meant for him (the only one who’ll ever be able to truly complete him, on a fundamental level) is with another and is, apparently, perfectly happy and content to be with that other person, and so will never even know or imagine (or truly care, for that matter) what his absence has done to lessen and to damage Kyp.

 **55.) Heal:** Luke regards Khaarmas with much the same kind of satisfaction and approval that one might regard the single final missing crucial piece that solves an intricate and mysterious puzzle (and odds are that if the Force had something to do with the notion Luke had of advising Kyp’s parents to send him on a vacation to go visit Han, then that’s precisely what the boy represents, to him); Gaeri is clearly taken with and nearly as fascinated by the youngling as her eldest child, Shmei’la, as are the rest of her girls (Mircaillé, Saori, and Linnaeam); Kyp’s parents, though caught entirely off-guard and more than a little bewildered by the chain of events that has resulted in Kelcenric’s only known remaining blood relative coming to Alderaan to be with them, welcome Khaarmas with the kind of fervency and unfeigned acceptance and openness and love that parents might use to welcome home a lost son; and as for Khaarmas, well, having been offered (and gladly accepted) a new family and a new home and healing and hope and the promise of proper training for his gifts among the Durrons and the other families staying at the chapterhouse on Alderaan, Khaarmas shows every sign of settling in and making a real place and life for himself among the Jedi Bendu: truly, in the days that follow their arrival, Kyp has plenty of reasons to quite often to wish that he were both as easy to welcome and to love as his uncle (who has obviously found not only a new family and friends but the mate of his heart and soul), and as flexible and as quick to heal as his uncle (who seems able to spring back from everything with the same kind of easy resiliency as a springy, whippy branch bending with the wind rather than breaking before it), especially since it somehow remains as impossible as ever for Kyp to either let go of his hurt and disappointment over Luke and Gaeriel’s marriage and his desperate (and foolishly impossible) love for Luke or to feel as though he will ever be able to really fill the yawning sense of emptiness that he increasingly feels consuming him or to recover from the increasing sense of brittleness and fragility and bitterness gripping him, heart and soul, a little more firmly with every new sign of Luke’s genuine love for Gaeriel.

 **56.) Hurt:** Truly, Kyp _likes_ the Alderaan chapterhouse – enjoys most of the company, thrives on the challenge of having some of the smartest, strongest Force-sensitives in the known galaxy as potential teachers and members of his training classes, and luxuriates in the fact that here people are more concerned with encouraging his potential and pushing him to his limits than in trying to get him to slow down or worrying about him getting hurt because he’s working too hard or pushing himself too fast – so much that, after a few months, he decides that even having to deal with essentially living cheek-by-jowl with irrefutable living proof that Luke and Gaeriel are a bonded couple (especially since Gaeriel seems to be extremely pregnant, _again_ , probably with yet another set of fraternal twin girls, if the pattern so far holds and her size is any indication) is worth it (at least for now), if only he can continue to work just as hard as he wants and as much as he wants with people like Xanatos and Bail Organa (neither of whom has even done so much as look at him askance for the air-tight shields he generally keeps up – or at least tries very hard to always keep up – whenever he’s around Luke or Gaeri or their girls, and both of whom seem to think that it’s a good idea to push him at least as hard and as quickly as he knows Luke and Leia once were pushed and challenged and taught, as younglings and young adults), even though a part of him knows that he’ll never be able to stay on Alderaan, once the distraction of his intensive, accelerated training starts to wear off and it begins to become impossible to keep himself from thinking (and feeling) too much about Luke being with Gaeriel.

 **57.) Away:** Around the time of his fourteenth birthday, they discover that Tarkin is still alive – somehow, though all reports place him squarely on the bridge of that monstrosity mere moments before its destruction, someone managed to get Tarkin away from the Death Star before it blew up (according to Luke’s fathers, a disturbance in the Force that began just prior to Luke getting the fatal shot off was likely the erection of some kind shield that allowed a Force-sensitive to safely get Tarkin to a lifepod or escape craft of some sort, even in the midst of the chain reaction of explosions, and then to shield said craft from the final cataclysmic death throes of the massive battlestation sufficiently to allow it to escape from the debris field, afterwards) – and that his people have commissioned another Death Star, this one much larger (with a diameter closer to that of a respectably sized planet, rather than of a small moon) and far better built than the first one, without the flaw in the exhaust system that proved to be the Death Star I’s downfall and with far much more armament and a vastly improved superlaser system (possessing greater fine-tuned accuracy than that on the first Death Star – allowing the Death Star II to fire its devastating superlaser successfully at smaller capital ships – as well as simply being more powerful and quicker to recharge after firing than the superlaser on the first Death Star); yet, despite the very real danger and in spite of his all but violent protestations that he should be allowed to fight or at least to offer his support in the coming battle, Kyp’s left behind at the chapterhouse (along with practically everyone else under the age of nineteen and Gaeriel, who opts to stay behind with her children, since Escharhea and Ashodeé aren’t even half a year old yet) with strict orders to watch over the younglings while Luke and Leia and Han and the others set out to find and to deal with this new threat . . . and, hopefully, to either capture and bring to justice or else to neutralize the threat posed by Tarkin once and for all.

 **58.) Home:** Theoretically, a large enough (or sufficiently strong) group of Force-sensitives in a battle meld working together to reinforce a world’s planetary shields could deflect an incoming barrage even from a weapon as powerful as that of the superlaser on the first Death Star; the Alderaan chapterhouse has become his new home, though, and Kyp doesn’t feel particularly comfortable about placing any bets on whether or not the same would hold true for weapon’s fire from this new Death Star, even with Jedi Bendu Masters like Obi-Wan and Anakin and Bail and Xanatos able to sense any danger to the chapterhouse and fetch the others and bring them all back to Alderaan in mere minutes (perhaps even mere moments, if the danger is great enough), to form such a protective meld, so he spends most of the next six months fretting and wishing that he was out there helping the others find and deal with the powerful new battlestation instead of stuck here worrying that Tarkin might bring it to Alderaan looking for revenge against the Jedi Bendu for thwarting so many of his plans.

 **59.) Later:** Later, he’ll wonder if the Force was trying to tell him something – if he might’ve been able to do something else to help if he’d spent less time focusing on his own anxieties and paid just a little bit more attention to whatever the Force may’ve been trying to say – but when the word comes that Tarkin somehow seemed to know which of their ships were carrying gravity well projectors this time and targeted everything capable of creating an interdiction field, letting him jump the second Death Star away from Endor’s life-bearing moon (confusingly also known as Endor) towards Alderaan, and that Obi-Wan and Anakin and Luke were on the battlestation when it went to hyperspace, leaving Han and Leia and Chewie behind on Endor (the heavily forested moon, that is) and most of the others scattered about in ships above the green moon, he’s far too busy panicking internally and doing his damnedest to try to keep the younglings from seeing it, so he can keep them from panicking, as well, to really do much of anything else.

 **60.) Now:** Kyp knows how the portal’s work (knows that traveling through the Force is all but instantaneous, irregardless of the distance being covered), of course, but it still manages to surprise him just how quickly Bail and Xanatos and Leia and Han and the others manage to essentially secure Endor and shift so much of the combined attack force from the Endor system over to the Alderaan system (leaving just enough personnel and ships behind to deal with the last couple of Star Destroyers and squads of TIE/In starfighters and TIE Interceptors abandoned over Endor by the Death Star II when it made its hasty jump to hyperspace, to avoid being trapped and destroyed like the first Death Star); afterwards, though, everything happens so rapidly that he’s forced to submerse himself deep enough into the Force that all other awareness falls away until nothing at all is left but the eternal moment of the _now_ , just so he can keep up with all of the events unfolding around him, and he’s far too busy simply reacting as the Force tells him to respond to spare enough thought or concentration for either surprise or worry.

 **61.) Destroy:** The likelihood of this new Death Star getting off a shot at Alderaan is too great to risk sending Leia and Han up in the _Falcon_ this time, so Chewie and a Sullustan member of Rogue Squadron by the name of Nien Nunb volunteer to go with Lando while Leia and Han are left behind, to add their power to the battle meld . . . which, as it turns out, is a good thing, because the new Death Star gets off three shots at Alderaan before the Jedi Bendu trapped on board the battlestation manage to damage the reactor core sufficiently for Lando (under Wedge Antilles’ covering fire) to fly far enough within the Death Star II to get close enough to fire the concussion missiles necessary to trigger a chain reaction of explosions within the reactor core damaging enough to utterly destroy the only slightly more than half-completed battlestation.

 **62.) Build:** This time, Tarkin dies with his superweapon: when Obi-Wan and Anakin and Luke land their battered stolen shuttle on Alderaan, there are five deeply unconscious Force-sensitives on the small craft with them – five, out of twenty were who waiting for them when they boarded the Death Star II, having somehow known that they would be coming and planning, apparently, to either capture Luke and kill his fathers or to trap them all on the new Death Star and leave them to be killed by their own people, when the battlestation was destroyed – and apparently Byss wasn’t the only Deep Core world Palpatine was using to house kidnapped Force-sensitives and build his army of so-called Dark Force-users, for the five Force-sensitives (eventually) all tell the same tale, after they wake, about being taken to and trained (indoctrinated and brain-washed, in truth) on a green moon orbiting round an ancient and largely desiccated Deep Core world, from which resources were regularly shipped to aid in the construction of an only partially completed city meant to one day be a world-spanning metropolis.

 **63.) Secure:** There’s something . . . almost familiar about the description of the richly verdant moon and its mysterious dry planet; none of the individuals who were rescued from the second Death Star were permitted to know enough about the system’s precise location to let them find either the world or its satellite again, though, meaning that there’s not a whole lot they can do, to get at the truth of it, aside from trying to blindly guess the location, given that the Deep Core was never all that thoroughly explored or charted even before Palpatine and his minions stole the information on the few mapped, secure hyperlane routes into the area from the old Jedi Temple Archives on Coruscant and, all things considered, the information they’ve recovered since then on the systems of the Deep Core has still got to be pretty darn incomplete.

 **64.) Unstable:** Alderaan isn’t damaged by the Death Star II’s superlaser – they not only manage to shield the planet, they successfully divert some of the energy released by the superweapon into the mechanisms controlling the planetary shields and other both defensive and offensive defense systems, too – and isn’t precisely in danger of being hit by any of the debris from the explosion of the battlestation, either; however, the sheer size and power of the station’s hypermatter reactor core is such that, during the final cataclysmic explosion, the hypermatter core actually (if briefly) implodes, the vast amounts of power generated by the annihilation of both so much hypermatter and the reactor meant to contain and channel that energy (thereby fueling the battlestation and allowing it to operate) combining to create a small hyperspace wormhole, unstable enough for the mouth in the Alderaanian system to collapse fairly soon after the wormhole’s creation but powerful enough to not only suck the vast majority of the debris (especially the smallest fragments) from the destroyed Death Star II into it, but to branch outwards randomly at several points along its tightly curved, tube-like bridge, sprouting a terminal mouth out of each of those branching point and, prior to the entire wormhole’s collapse, spewing swallowed debris out into the space beyond those points from those mouths, in essence causing fields of debris to suddenly spring into existence at random points scattered throughout the galaxy, potentially clogging well-traveled hyperspace lanes with asteroid-sized bits of the former battlestation and/or depositing fragments of the Death Star II close enough to inhabited planets or moons for radioactive fallout and artificial meteorites and meteors to be a real danger to those inhabitants, meaning that they most certainly do have a problem, since they need to figure out a way to track all of the various random points connected by that unstable hypermatter wormhole to the debris field of the destroyed battlestation – and quickly, before anyone can be injured by those myriad pieces of shattered Death Star II fragments.

 **65.) Insignificant:** Obi-Wan and Anakin certainly don’t mean to make others who are strong in the Force feel insignificant, but it’s terribly easy to feel like the smallest, weakest, most utterly unimportant being in all the ’verse when faced with individuals who are not only capable of mapping (with absolute accuracy) all the many random branchings of an unstable hypermatter wormhole just by relaxing into the Force a bit and allowing the knowledge to seep into their awareness, but able to use the Force to personally send sufficient numbers and supplies (ships, weapons, machinery, etc.) out to those locations to deal with the debris swallowed up and ejected by that wormhole along all of those various branchings – either by capturing and towing it away for salvage or by utterly obliterating it or else simply by relocating all of the various pieces and potential fallout (or fallout makers) in question to places where they won’t be able to cause damage to living beings – all in the space of a few minutes, well before anyone else can even think past the point of being relieved that it’s over with and the second Death Star is no more, much less begin to realize that the destruction of a weapon of such colossal size and power might result in a mess dangerous enough to require swift, precise handling for properly neutralization.

 **66.) Important:** Alderaan and a goodly sized portion of the rest of the galaxy all go completely mad with relief and joy, afterwards – the death of Tarkin evidently being deemed significant enough by most sentient beings to rank somewhere just below the unveiling of Palpatine as Darth Sidious and his subsequent annihilation but a great deal higher than such other important victories as the surrender of the vast majority of the Separatists forces and commanders and the subsequent defeat (and destruction) of General Grievous, the redemption of Darth Kra’taral and the subsequent freeing of the Dathomiri (and the loss to Tarkin and his so-called Empire of Man of a hugely formidably ally and dangerously powerful fighting force), or the explosion of the first Death Star – with hugely extravagant parties sweeping across whole planets and moons and gripping inhabitants in a fervor of unbridled celebration for days at a stretch; yet, when all the furor has died down, things pretty much go back to the way they were before, with just as much (if not more) emphasis being placed on the need for extensive training and unflagging vigilance at the chapterhouse: after all, even with Tarkin gone, it’s not like they suddenly don’t have any other enemies or threats to be worrying about, especially with this new Deep Core enclave (exact location unknown) of Dark Adepts in the mix.

 **67.) Fly:** The days fly by like nobody’s business, and, before he knows it, he’s celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of his natal day by being dragged off to some cantina in Aldera (mostly crammed full of university students) and having far, far too much alcohol poured down his throat by his mostly older friends: when he wakes the next day, unfamiliar muscles aching from some kind of strenuous activity, sticky in places he’d rather not think about, and reeking of stale sweat and old alcohol and cigarras to find himself sprawled (mostly naked) on an unfamiliar bed, half of which is being taken up by a young man (probably a couple of years older than he is) Kyp can’t remember ever seeing before (though he can guess how he could’ve ended up with him, regardless, given the youth’s sun-bleached honey-golden hair and gilded skin), the bottom drops out of his stomach and he panics so badly that it’s a miracle he manages to find all of his clothes and gear and get out of that place without waking his strange bedfellow up, and, later on, back in the safety of his private quarters (locked in the ’fresher with painfully scalding hot water pouring down over him as he curls up in the corner, retching and sobbing even as he desperately tries to scrub away the stink he can still all but _feel_ permeating him), he promptly swears off cantinas and drinking more than two drinks at a time while in company ever again, horrified at how close he probably came to giving himself away the night before (though, as it luckily turns out, no one who was with him seems to remember him picking up or allowing himself to be picked up by some random stranger with at least a passing resemblance to a young Luke Kenobi-Skywalker) and sickened by his apparent actions, too disgusted with himself to even try to remember what might have happened or whether or not he might’ve been able to fool himself into enjoying it.

 **68.) Crawl:** He really has no idea what the kriff he ever did to Leia, to make her dislike him, but he can’t help but notice that, the longer he’s on Alderaan, the more often she seems to go out of her way to avoid him and the more coolly disdainful her expression seems to be whenever she’s looking at him – like she’s been faced with some particularly vile form of filthy vermin that’s crawled up out of a garbage disposal and tracked filth all over her nice clean floors, or something – and usually it would bother him, to have no idea what he did to so clearly hack somebody off (especially someone as important to Luke as his twin sister); he’s feeling bad enough about what he did on his fifteenth birthday (whatever that actually was. He still has no idea precisely what it was that happened and he’s too much of a coward to try very hard to remember), though, that he can’t bring himself to blame her for not particularly liking him or wanting to be around him, so he just keeps his head down and tries to work hard while staying out of her way, and hopes that someday he might be able to feel like he deserves to look her (or her brother) in the eye again without feeling like he’s doing something wrong.

 **69.) Curl:** When Han tracks him down a couple of months after the whole cantina celebration fiasco, jubilant and entirely unabashed about trying to spread his joy, and insists that Kyp needs to be on hand for the wedding – that he personally wants Kyp to be among those who stand up for Han, as a witness to his character and his sincerity, when he marries Leia – he would like to do nothing more than curl up in a corner somewhere and die (Force, no wonder Leia’s been looking at him like something particularly foul scraped off of the bottom of one of her shoes!); it’s _Han_ , though, and he’d be more likely to cut out his own tongue than to do or say something that he knows would cause that man pain, so he musters up every happy memory he possibly can, smiles and _smiles_ and **_smiles_** for all he’s worth (even though Luke and Gaeri are of course not only _at_ the wedding but actually _in_ the wedding and naturally Gaeri has just announced that she believes she’s pregnant _yet again_ , with _another_ set of twin girls, most likely fraternal), and agrees gracefully and does his part without any complaining, just like a true friend should.

 **70.) Stretch:** He keeps having these strange dreams about some tow-headed little boy (who’s not much more than a baby, at least at first) with freckles and oddly solemn enormous green eyes – he’s been having them, when he thinks back about it, since about a year and a half after Luke rescued him from those witches – but no matter how far he stretches him mind back or how hard he tries to remember who the kid could be, he can’t place where or even when he ever met such a child, and, if it weren’t for the fact that the boy doesn’t really look all that much like Gaeri or Luke (his nose is ever so slightly aquiline but it’s also extremely straight, beneath that almost infinitesimal curve outwards at the bridge, not at all slanted upwards at the tip; his eyes are both this surprisingly intense dark green shade with maybe a dozen tiny flecks of bright amber scattered randomly throughout that green and thin rims of dark blue around the irises that are nothing like Luke’s bright blue eyes or Gaeri’s mismatched pale sea-green and light gray eyes; and, too, there are the freckles, scattered across pale, baby-fine skin like constellations of dark stars) and that his age keeps changing, increasing in an oddly natural looking manner each time Kyp dreams about him, he would assume that he’s dreaming about a child of Luke and Gaeri’s who’s yet to be born; somehow, though, he can just tell that this isn’t the case, and, although it bothers him vaguely not to be able to place the child, since the boy never really seems to be doing much of anything except peering up at him unblinkingly with those huge green eyes, watching him intently, and the dreams are irregular and infrequent enough that it’s taken him upwards of three years to even notice that he’s been dreaming about the same youngling, he finally decides that it must just be his subconscious playing tricks on him and stops straining his brain and worrying about trying to figure it out.

 **71.) Spoon:** Some days he just doesn’t understand what’s _wrong_ with him: he _wants_ Luke to be happy, would give anything (quite possibly even everything, if necessary) to keep Luke happy; he _adores_ Luke and Gaeriel’s girls (all three sets of fraternal twins) and wouldn’t trade them for anything in all the worlds (their joy at getting to see him, with the oldest four always gleefully crying out "Uncle Kyp!" whenever their paths cross, and, yes, even the requests to "Fly us, fly us!" make him feel like a giant among men, these days); he’s _proud_ to be thought of as a close enough friend to essentially be considered family by the entire Kenobi-Skywalker clan; and yet, every single time he sees Luke kissing or embracing or even, Force help him, gently touching or so much as softly smiling at or looking fondly upon Gaeriel, Kyp _still_ feels as if someone were enthusiastically trying to hack out his heart with no anesthetic and a particularly dull spoon.

 **72.) Fork:** He spears food with his fork as rapidly as possible (shoveling his meal into his mouth and swallowing everything so quickly that it’s probably a miracle he doesn’t choke himself), head lowered, gaze directed determinedly down at his swiftly emptying plate, ignoring Lhorian and Corran Halcyon for everything he’s worth as they pick and _pick_ and **_pick_** at him for the way he took his time tying his hair back out of the way before a sparring practice they just happened to observe and the way Kyp had to call a temporary timeout when the ribbon holding his heavy curls back out of his face slipped loose, teasing him about how a real enemy won’t wait for him to finish grooming himself properly before attacking him and making jokes about how maybe he thinks his beauty will stop any such attackers dead in their tracks, going off on a tangent about how maybe that means Kyp can be their secret weapon in a fight, until finally, unable to take their ribbing and not so very veiled insults any longer, once Luke’s name has entered into play, he slams the utensil down, turns on them with blazing eyes, and furiously (and quite loudly) snarls, "If you actually have some problem with me – other than that both of you blind morons seem to think I’m too karking pretty for my own good, since you keep forgetting I’m a teenaged boy instead of a woman – then either come out and say it or else shut the kriff up and let the rest of us finish a stanging meal in peace, you frinking barves!"

 **73.) Corner:** Because of his rather public explosion of temper, the Halcyons seem to think that their honor requires them to defeat him publicly at some display or another of Force-related skill; unfortunately for the Halcyons, Kyp has more raw strength in the Force than the two of them combined and is smart enough to best them both, is highly skilled at two-bladed combat and can be vicious enough in a fight to take the both of them down, and isn’t interested in letting them assuage their battered egos by making it look like he’s capable of doing anything less than beating their butts soundly in the fighter sims: no, the real problem arises later on, when Luke makes the mistake of trying to corner him, after he’s done wiping the Halcyons all over the training floor, the salles, and the sims, lecturing him urgently about the dangers of anger and picking away at him, persistently and quite earnestly (if also rather awkwardly) trying to get him to talk about whatever it is that’s bothering him, until finally he just can’t take it anymore and whirls on Luke and shouts, "Would you just mind your own frakking business? _Frell!_ It’s not like I actually hurt them or like you actually care about me!" before unceremoniously turning, hot tears scalding his eyes, and fleeing down the hallway just as fast as his feet can carry him.

 **74.) Escape:** The witch who managed to escape (when Luke led the rescue party, after Kyp’s second kidnapping) saves him from what he’s quite sure would’ve otherwise been an inevitable eventual thorough grilling by triggering yet another round of the seemingly endless battle to overthrow the government and the New Jedi Bendu Order and conquer the known galaxy (and how completely farkled is he, that he can be relieved to be saved, thus, no matter how awful the disaster actually may be?), after which everyone is entirely too busy (and, for quite some time afterwards, either too tired or else too wrapped up in the pain of their personal losses) to worry about some stressed-out spat he had with Luke (which, thankfully, no one else actually witnessed) over some fight with the Halcyons that may’ve gotten a little bit out of hand.

 **75.) Miss:** Zeth has been saying that he wants to fly, to be an officer of the fleet, ever since the first Death Star showed up, so Kyp really shouldn’t be surprised that his brother finally joined up; yet, somehow, the fact that he’s been gone from home so long that he missed the whole thing – the process of applying and of being accepted to one of the most elite schools, the farewell party, the transfer to Coruscant, _everything_ – makes it all seem a little unreal, enough so that he has a hard time remembering that now all of his brothers are out there, too, fighting the good fight, and that he could lose any one of them at any time if something were to go wrong.

 **76.) Hit:** Afterwards, Kyp can’t believe that no one saw it coming, that it never occurred to anyone until it was already far too late that they’d won too quickly, too easily, and with far too few casualties for such a dangerous foe, and it doesn’t matter if people are looking at him with anger, accusation, confusion, disappointment, pity, or nothing at all but blankness in their eyes: after it’s all over with, his nerves are rubbed so completely raw and he’s so full of guilt and so furious with himself that he feels as if he’s being hit every single time another being’s gaze so much as brushes past him.

 **77.) Crisis:** Han figures out that Leia’s pregnant literally in the midst of the climax of the crisis, after Kyp has gone tearing off by himself after the Sun Crusher (without permission, using the distraction posed by Gaeri going into slightly early labor to steal a ship from the academy and sneak off) and Han has gone chasing after him, determined to haul his ass back out of whatever line of fire he might manage to get caught in, and for a couple of terrifying moments Kyp actually thinks that Han is going to turn back and that he’s going to die, sucked in to the black hole along with the Sun Crusher and the Death Star prototype, but then he _senses_ Han, steady as a rock despite the fact that he’s frightened half out of his mind – not for any reason pertaining to himself, but for Kyp – and he knows that everything will be alright if he can just manage to get his too big body to cooperate and fold over and inwards enough to fit in the (far too small) message cylinder.

 **78.) Calm:** He’s about as surprised as he’s ever been when, after it’s all over with (the Sun Crusher and the Death Star prototype from the Maw Installation both taken care of), in one of the relatively calm lulls in between bacta and bota treatments and therapy, to repair the damage he did to his body cramming himself into that too small message cylinder, Leia comes in to see him and announces, with fierce determination, "So help me, Xekyprius Amortrian Durron, if you get yourself killed pulling one of these damned foolish heroic stunts of yours and break my brother’s heart and devastate my husband, I will come into the Force after you myself and I will drag you back out of it, kicking and screaming, if necessary, and turn you over to Master Revan so he can make you learn how to stay among us, like Masters Jinn and Dooku did, do you understand me?" waiting with her hands fisted on her hips until, thoroughly cowed, he nods, and, head raised high as if she’s won some sort of battle, she sweeps back out of his room in the Healers’ Ward again.

 **79.) Smile:** Kyp is barely back on his feet again when the next crisis (which, as it turns out, isn’t so much a new crisis as it is an extension of the earlier crisis, being a rather direct and furious reaction to his destruction of both the Death Star prototype and the Sun Crusher) hits, and maybe he’s not in the best shape for someone volunteering to act as part of Leia’s guard, now that the enemy has managed to penetrate Alderaan’s defenses enough to come entirely too close to capturing her and Han has convinced her to go to Kashyyyk with Chewie and lay low for awhile; he wants so badly for Leia to regard him with favor (now that she’s given him a sign that she actually would care whether he lived or died in the next battle) that he just can’t help himself, though, and besides, when the warm look of gratitude in Han’s eyes is not only echoed but overwhelmed by the sheer thankfulness of Luke’s gaze, he knows that he would’ve done it again, even if he’d still been a lot more badly hurt than he is, just to see Luke smile at him like that.

 **80.) Grimace:** The Force alone only knows how in the nine hells of Corellia the enemy managed to hide the fact that they were serious enough about taking Kashyyyk that they’d basically built a skyhook there, to help protect what they intended to be a permanent base; Kyp still manages to bring it down (onto the base, thankfully, which mostly takes care of that problem), though, so that they can escape (miraculously without too many losses) and hightail it to Coruscant, to warn the government about the new threat that’s coming . . . which is precisely how he ends up getting trapped in entirely too small of a room with a frantic, furiously protective Han and his pale and grimacing wife as Leia goes into slightly premature labor in the middle of an assault on both the planet as a whole and the actual palatial structure in which they’ve holed themselves up, and, despite the fact that he knows he’s probably going to his death, he’s never been happier to throw himself headlong into a battle against impossible odds, if only to give Han and Leia a bit of privacy and maybe even a chance to get out of this trap (if the Force is good and they have any luck left at all, that is) with their newborn twins still safely in their possession.

 **81.) Sane:** When he’s finally recovered enough from the beating he’s taken to stop physically hurting (he brought down most of a building, to stop the enemy from getting to Leia and Han and the babies, and he was too close to it to avoid that last wall) enough to be able to start thinking again, Kyp quickly becomes convinced that Luke and his girls and Han and Leia and the twins (fraternal twins, like Gaeri and Luke’s children have all been so far, but a girl and a boy, instead of both of them being girls) are the only things keeping him sane anymore, and he’s both pitifully glad that Gaeri doesn’t seem to have a problem tolerating how much time and attention so much of her immediate family – including her own husband – is lavishing on him, trying to help guard him from the crushing sense of darkness and guilt that’s been dogging his footsteps ever since the Sun Crusher was first used, and piteously thankful that the Kenobi-Skywalkers and the Solos, at least, don’t seem inclined to blame him for either this particular disaster (even though it technically _is_ his fault) or the many disasters that trailed the Sun Crusher in its devastating path across the galaxy.

 **82.) Mad:** His peace-loving parents are on retainer with the military, acting as consultants for various mineral-finding expeditions, agricultural projects, and refugee resettlement plans; Cel and Cal are medical officers who help to heal battered bodies and minds for the navy (and make a good enough team that they always end up stationed together); Zeth has temporarily put aside his desire for his own fleet command to make sure that the pilot trainees who aren’t necessarily all that strong in the Force are given sufficient support and drilling to make sure that they can not only fly circles around all kinds of machines but give even full Jedi Bendu pilots occasional runs for their money, in the sims or in space or in the skies; and Kyp, at the fairly young age of sixteen and a half, is essentially already a full-fledged Jedi Bendu Knight, expected to fight to his last breath (and even beyond, if possible) in the service of life and the Force, protecting the sentient beings of the galaxy: really, when Kyp looks back on Naboo, on his (mostly) peaceful childhood and the all but pacifist ideology his parents passed on him and his brothers, he can’t help but wonder if the whole galaxy has gone mad or if it’s just being in a constant state of war with Tarkin and the Sith and all of the other such power-hungry psychotics out there that makes it so damned hard for people to have normal, ordinary, peaceful lives anymore.

 **83.) Careful:** Kyp’s gotten used to having the youngling with big green eyes and blond hair and freckles in his dreams every once and a while – the boy’s become a regular fixture in his life, showing up briefly in his dreams once or maybe twice a month, his visits dependable in a way that some of the individuals he knows in his waking life aren’t, and there’s something oddly reassuring about the way that he shows up, pretty much like clockwork, every eighteen to twenty-one days – so he’s startled, the first time the boy show’s up in his dreams twice in the span of a week, and then he’s even more surprised when the youngling shows up again, only two nights after the last visit, and looks up at him from where he’s curled up on a bed, reading a datapad, to say, with astonishing clearness (despite a slight little burr of a lisp on a few words, caused mainly by the child’s youth), "Oh, it’s you again. You really should be more careful, you know. Someone’s going to find out, if you don’t learn how to shutter your eyes, and the Lady will use that against you and everyone you’ve ever cared about, if it ever gets back to her," before turning back to his datapad and nonchalantly continuing to read while Kyp stands and gapes dumbly down at the little one.

 **84.) Rash:** He can’t even pretend that he doesn’t know what the strange little boy was talking about – his adoration of Luke is something that he knows could be used against them, by their enemies, and it’s also something that he knows he won’t be able to hide from everyone for forever, no matter how much he might want to – yet, as much as he might want to be more careful and as much as he might long to alleviate the danger, he honestly doesn’t know how he could, short of asking to go on a pilgrimage of sorts to one of the other Jedi Bendu chapterhouses (like, say, the old Temple on Coruscant), just so he can get a bit more distance between himself and Luke for awhile, so he won’t be faced with the temptation to give in to his weakness all the time, and, to be perfectly honest, though he knows he’s not so rash as to actively court exposure of his secret, he’s not sure that he could come up with a way to justify such a journey without running the risk of making someone curious enough (or sufficiently suspicious) to find him out.

 **85.) Nervous:** Xanatos and Bail make Kyp a little bit nervous, to tell the truth – they may not have ever said anything to him about his excessive shields, but he knows how Bail’s gift works and how essentially impossible it would be for him to ever truly keep an emotion he feels so very strongly and thinks so very often on hidden from Bail (after all, telempathic catalysts are rare but hugely powerful beings), he’s aware that Bail and Xanatos consider Luke and Leia to be not just their fosterlings but essentially their own children, too, and he’s certainly cognizant as to just how protective Xanatos can be of those individuals he considers to be his responsibility (since, after all, Xanatos is one of the few beings who still worries constantly about Obi-Wan whenever Obi-Wan and Anakin are out on a mission) – but they’re the ones who’re basically in charge of the Alderaanian chapterhouse, and so they’re the ones he’s going to have to ask permission of, before he can try to take the coward’s way out and solve his problems by running from them, which means that he’s going to have to get it together well enough and for a long enough period of time to approach them calmly and rationally about the possibility of visiting the old Temple, if he really wants to be able to go without making them (or anyone else) wonder too much about his reasons for wanting to go.

 **86.) Tranquil:** Neither Xanatos nor Bail so much as blink, when he finally gets up the courage to ask – Bail just _looks_ at him with those dark eyes, face utterly tranquil, and notes, "You know this will only be a temporary reprieve: whatever you’re running from will still be here, when you return," while Xanatos seems to look _through_ him, light blue eyes clouded and dark with old pain, as he sighs, "Exile is never the answer, even when it is self-chosen," shivering a little until Bail turns and lays a hand on his shoulder – and, though he has a bad feeling that he may regret the decision to leave Alderaan (no matter how temporary his absence should prove to be), he has a worse feeling about his ability to keep hiding his reprehensible weakness from everyone else, so he just nods tightly, to show that he understands, and then he leaves just as quickly as humanly possibly without actually breaking and running, desperate to leave while still can.

 **87.) Work:** Coruscant is like no other place he’s ever been to before, like no other place he’s ever even dreamed of being before, and there’s so much to do – so much good to be done, still, especially in the lowest of the underlevels, where dangerously half-feral species and even wholly savage creatures mutated by generations of survival in the filth and darkness of those lowest tiers can still be found, just a few handfuls of levels down from the slums where the thugs and petty (if usually also far more violent) criminals, the desperate, and the abused underprivileged yet huddle, either deliberately hiding from or else somehow still unaware of the efforts of the Jedi Bendu and the government of the New Alliance of the Republic to clean up those underlevels and help relocate those who have been trapped there by poverty and ill-fortune to other, far less crowded worlds, where they might be taught trades of some sort and so be able to earn honest livings – that it’s easy to immerse himself in the work and keep himself so busy (and so tired from doing so much) that he just doesn’t have any time to really think about what he’s really doing, how he’s running from a problem that’s certainly not going to just magically resolve itself while his back’s turned because he’s too cowardly to try to deal with it himself.

 **88.) Rest:** Kyp is on Coruscant for nearly two months before he finally manages to almost get himself killed – he’s tired, which makes him stupid, which in turn makes him sloppy, and, when he runs into a pack of the mutated cannibalistic sentients (or Cthons, as the stories usually name them) who apparently still hunt the tunnels of the lowest levels, he forgets that the monsters are clever enough to use some technology that helps them hunt (like electroshock nets, for example), which allows them to temporarily capture him and to injure him badly enough that he has a hard time making his way back far enough uplevel to comm for help – and, though he tries very hard to convince the Healer attending him that it was just a stupid mistake and that it won’t happen again, the Healer easily recognizes the signs of impending exhaustion and bans him from the underlevels for at least the remainder of the year, all but ordering him onto sabbatical for rest . . . which Kyp tolerates just as long as it takes him to wheedle the Jedi Bendu starfighter corps into taking him on as a pilot.

 **89.) Wall:** Han and Leia’s twins aren’t quite half a year old yet when someone manages to steal Jacen away, and, despite the fact that it is an extremely short-lived kidnapping and they get him back safely without really needing help from anyone but Luke (who happens to be nearby when it happens) and in spite of the fact that Kyp’s well over half of the galaxy away from them when it happens, taking part in one of the highly diplomatic dances involved in coordinating defense drills with Jedi Bendu fighters and support squadrons like the Rogues with the pilots of the Chiss Ascendency’s Expansionary Defense Fleet, when he does finally find out about it (after the fact), Kyp feels horrible for not having been there, for not having known that something was wrong and done something either to stop the kidnapping from happening or else to get Jacen back to his parents that much more quickly, and the fact that he’s had a dream about that solemn-eyed green-eyed boy again – not looking up at him, this time, but instead looking down, with a soft smile, at the far too familiar figure of a gurgling and cooing baby in a crib – makes him want to bang his head repeatedly against the nearest wall.

 **90.) Door:** He’s almost made it to the door of the nursery (having come to visit the twins straight away, after getting back in) when Leia’s voice stops him, her straightforward words stripping him of all of his masks and armor, leaving him naked and shattered, shaking helplessly as he slides down into a huddled ball of terrified misery in the floor, and, though she comes and gently lifts him up, her small hands soft and kind as she guides him back to his room and sees to it that he’s tucked away into his bed, he can’t stop hearing her words ("Kyp, you need to stop. I know you mean well and I know how much you love this family, but _you need to stop._ Luke loves you and you’d be a perfect match for him, if he weren’t married, but the truth is that he is married, and he won’t give up Gaeri and the girls for you. Han doesn’t know yet – I’m not even sure if Luke really understands what this is, to be honest – but your eyes keep giving you away: you’re going to slip up and lose your mask, if you keep doing this, and I can’t see any way for that to turn out well. You’re just going to get yourself hurt, Kyp. _Please._ You _have_ to stop. Go home to Naboo for awhile, get some distance, _something_. Just don’t – don’t keep doing this. I can’t stand to see you doing this, sacrificing pieces of yourself so you can wrap yourself up tighter and tighter in your shields and pretend like there’s nothing there, like it doesn’t hurt you every time you see him. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt you, but you have to know this. It has to stop."), and he can’t repudiate the truth of them, any more than he can deny the terrible compassion in Leia’s voice as she essentially told him that she knew he was hopelessly in love with her twin brother.

 **91.) Misery:** The green-eyed blond youngling is back in Kyp’s dreams again, that night, doing something even more unusual and shocking than ever – weeping, curled up in bed in a tight knot of devastatingly heartbroken misery, sobbing so hard that the whole bed is shaking, and yet, oddly enough, somehow also crying without making any real noise – and, though he feels suddenly uncomfortable, as if he’s intruding on something intensely private (something that he has no right to be seeing), after a few moments of startled gaping, he moves to sit down gingerly on the bed, scooting over next to the boy and awkwardly reaching out to place a hand on the boy’s shaking back, in an effort to provide comfort of some kind: at first the boy stiffens under his touch, his whole body abruptly snapping rigid, but then, as if he somehow senses that it’s just Kyp, he pushes himself up off of the mattress, and, with a strangled noise, violently hurls himself into Kyp, clinging to him with desperate strength as he whispers, brokenly, "They got him – they took him, and I was supposed to be watching him, I was supposed to be taking care of him, but I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t strong enough, and _they took him away!_ " his guilt and his anguish so overwhelming that Kyp feels like joining the youngling and crying, too, and can barely make himself whisper any words of comfort at all as he hugs the grief-stricken boy tight, rocking him in his arms like Zeth used to do for him, when he was little.

 **92.) Joy:** He’s not even seventeen frakkin’ years old yet and he’s already forgotten what joy or even simple contentment feel like, anymore – forgotten what it feels like, to not _want_ and to be miserable and afraid and hate himself for his weakness – but by Asherah, that doesn’t mean he wants other people to be miserable, too, that he wants the youngling from his dreams to be in basically the same kind of plight that he is or that he wants the newly returned Jacen to seem as discontent and angry and unhappy as that boy (whose name Kyp is _really_ beginning to wish he knew. He has a feeling that he’d understand exactly why this strange yet oddly familiar boy has been haunting his dreams, if only he knew the youngling’s full name), and it hurts him, that he can’t help, that he doesn’t know what to do (or what could even be done, if not by him then by another) to try to make things better again.

 **93.) Stolen:** Jacen wasn’t physically hurt, during his kidnapping or imprisonment, but he acts like he doesn’t know or even want to know his parents or twin sister or much of anyone else, either, really – he frets when left in close proximity with Jaina, turns his head away from Han and Leia and shivers or cries whenever they try to hold him, and has hellacious fits whenever Chewie or Lando or any of the Jedi Bendu who used to watch over him all the time try to pick him up. Han and Leia are about at their wits’ ends and the Healers and Minders are all stumped, though more than one of them has whispered that the boy behaves almost as though he were in mourning, as if he’d been stolen away from someone he loves and not taken back from enemies who abducted him from his real family – yet, for some reason, he seems fascinated with Luke, and, for some reason Kyp cannot even begin to fathom, Jacen also seems to tolerate (and even, occasionally, to enjoy the company of) Kyp, so even though a part of him desperately wants to be gone from the chapterhouse and away from Luke again, he finds himself staying, despite the pleading, pitying looks that Leia keeps giving him and despite the fact that his heart feels like its simultaneously being crushed and ripped out of chest every time he crosses Luke’s path.

 **94.) Given:** Luke literally bumps into Kyp, about a week after Kyp’s come back to Alderaan, on his way back to his quarters from the nursery (where he’s been sitting with Jacen while Han sits nearby and talks to him, in an effort to acclimate Jacen to his father’s presence again), looking like death warmed over – anxious, wan, drawn, and just plain tired – yet, after steadying himself by gripping Kyp’s left shoulder, he flashes Kyp a smile (small, crooked, but brightly blazing and beautiful, warming him straight through and leaving him feeling lax and lightheaded and languid and weak), tightens his hand around Kyp’s shoulder, and insists, with such earnestness that Kyp can’t even begin to control his blush, "I don’t know what it was that we did, to deserve being given you, but the Force smiled on us when it sent you here. You’ve been a true friend – a real blessing. Thank you, Kyp. Thank you so much, for helping with Jacen. I don’t know what we’d ever do without you," his touch and his smile working together on Kyp in such a way that it’s not until much later, after the almost drunken sense of dizziness and euphoria have left him, that it occurs to him to be ashamed, to have just stood there and accepted such thanks when he so manifestly does not deserve them, considering how much damage he could (and, to his shame, sometimes desperately wants to) do to Luke’s family, if he ever gave in to the temptation to just reach out and grab Luke and press their lips together in a ravenous kiss.

 **95.) Grip:** The youngling in his dreams looks increasingly bad, whenever he sees him now – his body worn thin and hard, his face rigid and like a mask, his bright green eyes not just hooded or blank but dark and empty of all feeling – but he continues to hold on to Kyp like someone cast adrift in an ocean might cling to the only shred of wood afloat for klicks and klicks around, and the grip the boy has on him, in his dreams, is so very like the grip that Jacen often has on Luke, anymore, in real life, that he’s starting to seriously wonder if he might not be losing his mind, after all, and making the boy up, in some desperate attempt to feel just a little bit closer to Luke.

 **96.) Let Go:** Months have passed since Jacen’s rescue with no real change in his behavior and Kyp is heading to the nursery again, for another session of sitting with the boy and his father, when a child’s voice (blurred with extreme youth but nonetheless painfully intelligible) suddenly defiantly screams, "Let go! _Let go!_ Put me down _now!_ I don’t want you! I don’t _like_ you! Give me ’Sin! Where’s ’Sin? _I want ’Sin!_ Take me back home to _’Sin!_ " and, quite suddenly, Kyp is abruptly sure that he hasn’t been imagining the boy in his dreams after all and, moreover, that he’s not the only one who’s been dreaming about the green-eyed youngling, either, because the Force is telling him, with all of the subtlety of someone shouting in one ear while someone else screams the exact same thing in the other ear, that the freckled little blond boy’s name is _Jynsin_. . . and that Kyp not only should have been trying to find him long before now and has been neglecting a vitally important duty, by failing to attempt to locate him, but that he is also at least partially responsible for the misery currently permeating the extended Kenobi-Skywalker clan (especially the Solo branch of the family), given that his failure to find and to rescue Jynsin has indubitably led to Jacen’s current heartbreak and basic refusal to accept the fact that he’s back with his real family again.

 **97.) Push:** He really wishes he knew what he could say and whom he should be saying it to, to get someone else to consider the fact that Jacen’s so-called imaginary friend (labeled thus by a frighteningly brittle but insistent Leia, who, as she has more than once put it, "will not go along with this nonsense – I absolutely _refuse_ to countenance any talk or action that might reinforce Jacen’s unhealthy dependence on this imaginary friend, this leftover coping mechanism from his abduction – and anyone who thinks otherwise will swiftly find themselves banned from the nursery, so help me!") might in fact be a very real little boy who, from the sound of things, may be in serious need of help, given that he was apparently left behind in the clutches of that insane witch, when Jacen was rescued; unfortunately, though, Luke, Gaeri, Han, Bail, Xanatos, and the Experimentals and their mates are all abiding by Leia’s wishes (however unreasonable), Obi-Wan and Anakin have already left again on another mission, and he’s frankly too frightened of what Leia might say to him (about his foolishness, about his selfishness, about Luke) to try to challenge her himself, even though he has a really bad feeling that he’s going to regret not pushing the point some day . . .

 **98.) Pull:** Since they’re all basically under standing orders not to mention the kidnapping and to deny that ’Sin is a real person, Jacen doesn’t talk to anyone a whole lot (which is unsurprising, really, given that Jynsin is probably his favorite topic of discussion); when he does talk, though, it almost always leaves Kyp feeling like he’s been gutted (especially on those rare few times when Jacen neither tries to argue by listing every single thing he can remember ’Sin ever saying or doing nor gives up enough to go silent on the subject, if only for a little while, instead simply flatly declaring, "You’re lying. On _purpose_. Everyone’s wrong about ’Sin not being real, but you and Uncle Luke, you’re both _lying_. You _know_ he’s real. You’ve seen him. I _know_ it. I _know_ when you lie to me!") and scrambling madly to pull himself back together again before someone else can see how devastated he feels and start to wonder why Jacen’s longing for his ’Sin strikes such a nerve with Kyp, especially when he can’t help but flinch every time Jacen brings up the fact that Kyp and Luke are both liars – an accusation which, the one time Luke happened to be in the room with Jacen at the same time as Kyp, prompted Luke to throw Kyp a look that was a mixture of confusion, anguish, shame, and something so very much like longing (like Luke might actually know what Jacen’s talking about, like Luke might be the one who’d recognize Jynsin, if Kyp were to try to describe the youngling from his dreams) that Kyp practically bolted from the room, to get away from Luke before he could say or do anything foolish.

 **99.) Advice:** After spending most of the better part of a year back at the Alderaanian chapterhouse, the only thing Kyp is really sure of (aside from the fact that he’s a miserable excuse for a human being and an even worse excuse for a Jedi Bendu) is that he would still _really_ like to be able to take Leia’s advice (to go home for awhile, get some distance again, and, maybe, if he’s lucky, gain some perspective, too, in the process, if not about Luke then about the Jacen and Jynsin problem); right about the time that he’s sure he can’t take it any longer, though, Leia gets too big to be able to easily hide it anymore, after which it gets out that she’s pregnant again and an attempt is made to snatch her when she’s out in the artisans’ market, shopping, and he can’t, he just _can’t_ , it’ll destroy what little is left of his sense of self-worth, if something happens to her or the children and he’s not there to help because he’s a lovelorn idiot who’s too stupid to get it through his damnably thick skull that he can never have Luke, not like he wants him, and that’s pretty much the end of that, because it’s all one mad scramble of danger and difficulty and close call upon crisis and calamity and catastrophe, afterwards, and they’d have to knock him unconscious and haul him off under heavy sedation to get him to leave in the middle of a fight when the people he cares about are being threatened.

 **100.) Order:** They’re supposed to’ve taken care of the last of the Palpatine clones – altered and unaltered; grown far too quickly for mental or physical stability, created using experimental methods to take care of such haste-inspired instability, and raised at a normal rate, as if they were the children of the Sith Lord rather than his clones; completely clinically insane (in various different ways), just psychopathic, and merely somewhat (apparently naturally) inclined towards sociopathic behavior – and destroyed the last of the viable genetic samples necessary to create any other such clones back when Luke and Leia were still children, most of them years before Kyp was even born, and, somehow, the shock of finding out that they not only missed something that was apparently still viable enough for the enemy to use it to grow yet another clone but that the enemy has apparently also found some way to shield the presence of a psychopathic Sith even from Obi-Wan and Anakin themselves, given that no one has sensed the monster, prior to the first of the awful attacks, is worse than the shock of finding himself under orders to take Leia and the twins and Gaeri and the girls and retreat, even though the fight is still underway and things don’t seem to be going all that well for Coruscant and he’s never fled from a battlefield before in his nearly eighteen full years of life.

 **101.) Ordinary:** Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are probably the only people in the universe who scare him in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they’re evil (because they’re anything _but_ evil) or that they do bad things to people (because they go out of their way to avoid hurting others, even those who might deserve it) and everything in the worlds to do with the fact that it’s just downright frightening, to think about _anyone_ wielding that much power, and alright, so, yeah, that’s probably a sentiment that would spark raised eyebrows and disbelieving laughter from a lot of beings, because he’s Kyp Durron and he’s strong enough in the Force that he’s basically as powerful as Luke or Leia (even Galen admits that Kyp can channel a bit more raw power than he can, and Galen Marek tends to do things with the Force that scare people, they’re so beyond the scope of the possible for ordinary individuals) and, all jokes aside, if he really wanted to, he could use the Force to literally crack a planet in two like a regular person might crack open an egg, but Mother Asherah bless, it’s just downright freaky, to see people who are capable of literally ripping a person open (especially a being as powerful as the Palpatine clone) and shredding that person from the Force until nothing at all is left, neither soul nor mind nor spirit or flesh, without even needing to pause and take a bracing breath first or wait to take even a bit of a breather before going on to neutralize the next threat afterwards.

 **102.) Grandiose:** Either the enemy are finally ( _finally!_ ) starting to run out of resources to throw at them or else they’re hoping to lull them into a false sense of safety and complacency as part of some kind of elaborate new long-range scheme to eventually defeat them, because after the debacle with the Palpatine clone and his World Devastators and Galaxy Gun (and Lady Asherah bless, but the ridiculousness of such grandiose names for weapons is almost enough to make him long for knowledge of some other superweapon, just so long as it has a regular, unpretentious name) is over with, they have almost a whole year of (relative) peace before someone tries to snatch Anakin Solo and Han Solo, Jr., and then it’s once again back to fighting, and trying to hide and safeguard the younglings, and scrutinizing every single being who so much as passes by for signs that he or she or it might be yet another enemy infiltrator or someone who’s either been paid off or somehow blackmailed into cooperating with the enemy . . . especially after it comes out that Gaeriel is pregnant _yet again_.

 **103.) Leave:** Jacen hasn’t so much give up on trying to convince everyone who comes in contact with him that ’Sin is real (and that he’ll never forgive those responsible for taking him away from ’Sin by leaving him behind, when Jacen was being rescued from the enemy) as he’s just drawn back in upon himself and refused to have much of anything to do with anyone else, aside from Luke and Kyp and, occasionally, Obi-Wan and Anakin (whenever they can cram in enough time between missions for a visit): though he doesn’t have fits anymore when people try to touch him or talk to him or pick him up, he makes is eminently clear that he’s just not at all interested in being around other people, spending most of his time on his studies (and advancing at an almost eerily quick rate, for one so young, not only in his regular education – his words and his apparent level of comprehension of the words and actions and motivations of those around him almost frighteningly advanced, even compared to other members of his family – but with the Force as well, seeming to understand many concepts and to grasp several abilities instinctively, without any kind of instruction whatsoever) and on observing (and occasionally befriending) much of the local fauna while studiously avoiding and/or largely ignoring most of the sentient beings around him at the chapterhouse; thus, though he’s gotten to the point where he’ll at least tolerate the proximity of his twin sister and parents and their closest friends (at least most of the time), it’s really no surprise when Leia and Han opt to leave Jacen and Jaina in the chapterhouse crèche, though Kyp fails to understand just why it is that they think the Jacen and Jaina will be safer on Alderaan when they also seem to believe that they can protect the babies better by hauling Anakin and Han Solo, Jr., around with them everywhere they go, no matter how dangerous their destinations (or their travels) might get.

 **104.) Return:** Some days, it seriously seems at though the disasters and the fighting never stop, that no sooner has one battle been won and one possible calamity been resolved or averted than yet another potential catastrophe arises to take its place, forcing them to wade back into the thick of things with lighsabers swinging and blasters blazing and the Force guiding their hands so their hits won’t falter: when one group of would-be kidnappers has been dealt with and the Solos have finally decided that it’s safe to return home to Alderaan once more only for yet another group of would-be abductors to make themselves known via an unsuccessful attempt against Luke’s children _on Alderaan itself_ , Kyp seriously finds himself beginning to wonder if they’re making any measurable progress at all or if all of the titanic struggles and the sacrifices and the pain they keep putting themselves through don’t really amount to anything more than just barely keeping themselves afloat – running to stand still, as it were.

 **105.) Single:** Unfortunately, the death of Wilhuff Tarkin hasn’t seemed to overly phase the so-called Empire of Man – the humanocentric slave traders of the Senex-Juvex area of the Mid Rim region, the ever greedy and rebellious commercial and moneymaking powers of the Corporate Sector in the Tingel Arm and the simply rebellious powers found within the nearby Tion Cluster, and those who filled the vacuum of power left behind in the humanocentric Seswenna Sector (as well as in much of the surrounding affiliated and/or conquered areas of the Outer Rim, including what used to be Hutt Space) when Tarkin and the majority of his top commanders perished are, unfortunately, still allied with a few greedy, power-seeking corporations and conglomerates led by former Separatists (most notably Shu Mai of the Corporate Guild and Wat Tambor of the Techno Union, whose lust for power and wealth continues to drive them to ignore the fact that they are treated as automatically lesser by their supposed allies, on account of their alien statuses, and are far more likely than not to end up being betrayed by their humanocentric allies, since they aren’t human or even near-human enough to try to pass) who refuse to accept the fact that the free beings of the galaxy will not allow them to run roughshod over any and all other sentient beings who might get in their way, solely in the name of their personal profit and power – and that means that, despite all the progress they’ve made (and continue to make) against their enemies, the threat posed against the New Alliance of the Republic and the New Jedi Bendu Order by this single faction of their enemies remains both very real and very large.

 **106.) Set:** Lioben (or Ben, as the girls prefer to call him) is . . . an oddity, and not just because he’s the only one of Luke and Gaeriel’s children to be a single birth or because he’s quite a bit younger than the next oldest set of his siblings, in comparison to the relatively small periods of separation between all of the various sets of twins (given that the twins – Shmei’la and Mircaillé; Saori and Linnaeam; Escharhea and Ashodeé; and Kyandis and Darshurvai – have all been born roughly two years apart, whereas he’s nearly four years younger than the youngest of his older sisters) or was so utterly unexpected by his parents: there is something truly _different_ about the boy, something strange, almost fey, as if somehow the boy were not merely a child of Luke and Gaeri’s or as though he were not even truly just a child at all, the way he holds himself and looks at the world around him (blue eyes focused, penetrating, _knowing_ , as if the mind behind them were much, much older than that of a child’s) and behaves (so quiet, so solemn, so sad) much more like the way that Kyp’s always heard the Experimentals (who were patchworked together with the knowledge and memories of other beings – essentially, the lives of Jedi Knights and Sith Masters of old) behaved, when they were first taken out of the laboratories and their tanks and allowed to truly _live_ , than like any real child Kyp’s ever seen or known or heard tell of (with the closest approximation he can come up with being the green-eyed boy in his dreams), and he finds it slightly disconcerting, at times, the way the redheaded little boy _looks_ at him and the way he behaves, as though he knows things about Kyp that he could not possibly know, things that even Kyp himself does not know about himself.

 **107.) Safe:** For stars’ sakes, they’d thought that Bakura would be _safe_ , after the last round of would-be kidnappings and attempts to target Alderaan, that it would be a good idea for Gaeri and the kids (including the baby, Ben, who wasn’t quite a year old yet) to go pay the other side of the family a little visit, and, as the wave of death and destruction crashes over him and he feels Gaeri reaching out to brush against him (whispering into his mind about how he has to be there for Luke, now, and that she expects him to look after her husband and to help him understand how to love and be happy again) before her spirit rushes past, on the way to Luke, so she can tell her husband goodbye, Kyp has just enough time for a bitter laugh (this isn’t what he wanted, this isn’t _at all_ what he wanted!) before the whole world seems to explode, his awareness consumed by the ravening black hole of pain and anger and devastated fury that is Luke Kenobi-Skywalker in the Force.

 **108.) Danger:** Kyp insists that he’ll be in no danger (since he honestly believes that he’s one of the few individuals Luke cares about enough to still be able to recognize and so at least pause long enough to try to go around, rather than just blow right on through him, and he firmly believes that he’s both the most expendable of the individuals on hand to go after Luke – the children certainly aren’t an option and neither is Leia, no matter what she says about how much better she’s feeling and how she’s sure she could get through to Luke, how she thinks she can make him listen, even if he doesn’t want to – and that they can’t afford to wait until one of Luke’s fathers get back before they act) until he finally wears the Enclave Council down and they agree to send him after Luke.

 **109.) Exist:** His world would cease to exist, without Luke: it is that easy, that simple, and _that_ is why he is going to save him, why he _has_ to save him, why he will give anything and everything that is required of him, in order to save him.

 **110.) Live:** The thought of losing Luke, of him throwing his life away in some grief-maddened act of vengeance against those who took Gaeriel from him, panics Kyp to the point where he has no idea what to do, and so, desperate, he reaches out for Luke with all of the love that’s in him, and he cries out, "Luke, stop and think about what you’re doing! Gaeri never would have wanted you to do this! She _never_ would’ve wanted this! She wanted you to _live_ , not to die for her!"

 **111.) Die:** He’ll do anything for Luke – absolutely _anything_ : live for him; die for him; surrender his soul for him, if necessary – and if he can just get Luke to understand that, then maybe, just _maybe_ , they’ll have a chance to get through this.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

**Author's Note:**

>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!
> 
>  **Clarification Note:** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is so entirely not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that not only did I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU series (though, in my defense, when I first started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is now over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS), but I have this horrible habit of becoming distracted by other characters and stories and not being able to write things consistently in anything approaching chronological order. One of these days, I fully intend to rectify part of that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM; unfortunately, though, in the meantime, I have several generations' worth of SW characters all cluttering up my head with their stories, and sometimes someone just happens to be a lot more persistently vocal than anyone else, which is why, for example, I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Kyp, who isn't even near to being born yet in my current SW timeline. He'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to various sequels of my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio; to be honest, though, I was mostly just trying to get a feel for him, by banging this character study out, and I have a feeling that this won't end up being the last word, when it comes to working out this particular character sketch. Folks might want to keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for quite a bit of AU material quite a bit further down the line than I have gotten around to writing yet and so really should be still considered at least somewhat experimental/loose in nature!


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